BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Educational Psychology
Improving cognition and perception towards failure: A conceptual replication study
Provisionally accepted
- National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Despite its pedagogical value, failure is not often desired by students. To address this motivational barrier, we report a conceptual replication study that explored the synergistic effects of combining design principles from two distinct research traditions – growth mindset and utility value – to improve students' dispositions toward failure. Using a single-group pre-post design, N = 68 lower secondary students from engaged in a pilot intervention involving prediction-explanation cycles on growth mindset myths along with evaluation of peer quotations reframing failure. Mixed methods analyses showed that this brief intervention was successful in significantly improving students' learning goal orientation and attitude towards mistakes (strong effect sizes), representing rapid change in traditionally difficult-to-influence areas in education. Conversely, deeper cognitive orientations pertaining to beliefs about ability and the utility of failure showed non-significant improvements (weak to moderate effects). These results call on educators to proactively design repeated sensemaking opportunities involving reflections and vicarious learning to improve students' cognition and perception regarding failure.
Keywords: failure, goal orientation, growth mindset, Learning design, Utility value
Received: 19 Jun 2025; Accepted: 24 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Sinha. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Tanmay Sinha, tanmay.sinha@nie.edu.sg
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.