Introducing Failure as a Deliberate Instructional Strategy to Enhance Learning and Academic Outcomes Students often dread to fail in an academic course and are worried about the consequence that follows. Failure seems to have a negative connotation among students at large. While the literature on organizational learning, innovation, and entrepreneurship often focus on failure as a critical ingredient to learning. What makes academic failure less acceptable to that of corporate? In this paper, we explore the importance of failure in the learning process and how the frequency of failure impacts learning and academic outcome. We conducted an experiment with sixty management students who played a business simulation game. We measured their academic response to failure, their perception about their performance, and the perceived importance u0026 relevance of the task. We found that in a situated learning environment, students tend to persist in the event of encountering failure and not relent.

The relation between academic achievement and the spontaneous use of designthinking strategies Abstract   Designthinking strategies are believed to enhance performance and learning, but it is unclear whether these strategies have any relation to the types of learning measured by tests of academic achievement. This study examines the relations between studentsu0027 prior academic achievement, their choices to use designthinking strategies of seeking critical feedback and revising their work, and their learning during a 1015min online activity. Sixthgrade students designed three digital posters. After each poster, they had chances to seek either critical or confirmatory feedback, followed by a chance to revise the poster or not. Results show that prior academic achievement is positively related to studentsu0027 spontaneous use of critical feedbackseeking and that critical feedbackseeking is positively associated with studentsxe2x80x99 performance on the poster design task through revising, regardless of prior academic achievement. Prior academic achievement indirectly predicts performance, first through critical feedbackseeking and then through revising. One possible interpretation is that students who exhibit higher academic achievement attained those levels because they had spontaneously employed these strategies during their academic studies. To test this claim, future work needs to determine if instruction in designthinking strategies increases student academic achievement.