The faces of failure: understanding students’ affective experiences with failure in introductory chemistry laboratory learning activities

Failure is recognized as valuable to learning in the classroom and research contexts. While interventions incorporating failure into learning have been explored in science education, the affective experience of failure is less understood. From an affective experience lens, failure is stigmatized and not accounted for in learning and assessment. This study explores introductory chemistry students’ affective experiences with failure through qualitative semi-structured interviews framed from an interpretivist lens. Students shared that failure is overwhelming, shapes their beliefs, is not accounted for in course design, and is defined by the learning and assessment outcomes. Asking students to fail as a part of their learning is much more nuanced than previously discussed interventions where failure is part of the design. This study explores the idea that not all failures are created equal and provides insight into laboratory activities and assessments that ask students to fail. Paying attention to students’ experiences can change your mindset as an educator and offer pathways to creating learning environments that reduce judgment, allow instructors to share their own failures, and offer feedback to help students move forward with their failures.