Competition in academia commonly remains an inherent part of the university experience allowing opportunities for students to come across failures. When a student fails, they have typically two options: persist (i.e to keep on going) or give up (i.e drop out). Prior studies have focused on factors that contribute to failures among students at risk for dropout, and few studies have examined the characteristics of students who failed and persisted in their school work. To fill the gap in the literature, Ajjawi et al. (2020) examined how students who failed academically but continued their studies make sense of and respond to their own failures. 

To examine how persisting students respond to their failure in school, Ajjawi et al. (2020) collected anonymized institutional data about the demographic information of students in 4 courses (Education, Civil Engineering, Nursing, and Commerce) across all years of study at an Australian university. The researchers also surveyed 186 undergraduate students who failed at least one unit of study in 2016, but are still enrolled in 2017. The survey questions targeted students’ explanations of their academic failures and their emotional responses to them. The results showed that academic failure increased the likelihood of dropping out of a course or school (withdrawal) by 4.2 times. Among students who failed at least one unit of study in 2016 (3663 students), 70% of them persisted with their studies. Moreover, students who failed and persisted attributed their failures to 3 factors: dispositional (study habit, social isolation, language difficulties), situational (financial strains, health, work), and institutional factors (rules/policy, curriculum design, teaching staff). Despite the variety in their attributions of academic failures, the persisting students felt negative about their failure and frequently used emotional words such as “disappointed”, “stressed'', and “depressed”. 

Ajjawi et al.’s study (2020) raises the question of how students overcome their failures and the negative emotions associated compared to those students who failed and dropped out of the course or school. The study also provides educators insight into students’ emotional responses to and attributions of academic failures, which can help better design intervention programs to motivate students who encounter academic failures and help them obtain better academic performance.  The results of this study, specifically dispositional factors such as maladaptive study habits, are also related to EPIC’s research studies as we are interested in how students conceptualize and respond to academic failures. It will be interesting to look at how individual differences (i.e. personality traits, self-concept) relate to students’ perceptions of and reactions to academic failures. 

For more information about this study, check out the link to retrieve the journal article:

https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2019.1664999

This article was written by Katelyn Chow.

Reference:

Ajjawi, R., Dracup, M., Zacharias, N., Bennett, S., & Boud, D. (2020). Persisting students’ explanations of and emotional responses to academic failure. Higher Education Research & Development, 39(2), 185-199.