I failed! And now? A study of the relationships between the senses attributed to failure and the intentions of persistence

Abstract

Although some works argue that excessive failures and students' decisions to dropout or persist in their courses are directly related, evidence shows that this linkage is, actually, mediated by the senses they attribute to academic failures. The construction and attribution of such sense constitute a dynamic process of cognition reorganization and regulation. Students assess their actions, reflect on the determinants causes of their performance, and react by seeking success in their goals; in other words, they mobilize self-regulatory cognitive subfunctions of self-assessment, causal attribution, and self-reaction. Grounded in the Social Cognitive Theory and Bandura's conception of self-regulation, we investigate the main senses that students attribute to their academic failures and how such sense influence their decision to dropout or persist. To that end, we developed and administered an online questionnaire to 65 students enrolled in Physics courses or courses with a Physics emphasis, who have been failed at least once. The results indicate that failures are predominantly conceived as a negative experience, leading some students tend to understand it as something intrinsic and insurmountable, which contributes to a lower intention of persistence. However, students who, performed negative self-assessments, but self-reacted positively, demonstrating a greater intention of persistence. The results highlight the potential of multidimensional analysis of senses for the planning and proposal of actions to reframe experiences considered stressful, such as academic failures.