Making failure desired during learning – A quasi-experimental study

Abstract

One hundred and nineteen ninth-grade students engaged in one of two preparatory interventions – growth mindset or utility value – aimed at increasing the desirability of failure in learning during a quasi-experimental study. An additional fifty-one students participated in a control condition that offered no such preparation. Everyone then underwent a standard productive failure learning task where they ideated to solve an open-ended math problem prior to receiving a formal lecture on the targeted concept. Following mixed-methods analysis, my empirical results for the growth mindset and utility value conditions showed improvements in students’ beliefs about failure and their math expectancies, and similar persistence behaviors during problem-solving (compared to the control condition). Posttest performance following the lecture did not differ across the three conditions. With this work, I bring together complementary lines of research on low-cost and scalable motivational interventions in learning, typically applied to improve engagement with learning content, to contemporary learning sciences pedagogies like productive failure, in the novel service of making failure desired for students.