Psychology in the Classroom

In this final summary interview with Prof. Dr. Suzanne Narciss, we review all our learning about failure over the last few months. There is much we can do to encourage our students to learn from errors, including interactive formative assessment and feedback strategies, prompting reflection and adaptive strategies for dealing with errors and using other people’s errors. As teache

More than one in 10 children ‘almost always’ or ‘often’ fear failure. But where do they learn this from? This fear can often pass from parents to children. Parental communication about failures and setbacks plays a critical role in shaping a child's perception of mistakes. In her research Dr Elizabeth Peterson found that: Clear action plans without discussion of collabora

Today's discussion focuses on our perceptions, as teachers, of failure. When as a teacher we watch our lessons back on film where do we see failure and how do we respond? Reflecting on our own relationship with failure could be important in informing our practice in the classroom. For example our personal relationship with failure will inform how we respond to student failure and t

How students and teachers navigate and prioritise different learning processes after encountering impasses during learning can be complex. Recognising that failure moments can be multifaceted, today’s episode explores how classroom discourse reveals varied valued learning processes, such as problem-solving, preventing future issues, and developing troubleshooting skills. The rese

How errors are handled in the classroom is an important aspect of teaching and has a variety of consequences for students' own dealing with errors, their learning and their performance. In classrooms with a negative error climate, students are more likely to experience fear of making mistakes and feel alienated from their teachers. Teachers' unsupportive behaviours, such as negativ

In order to learn from errors it is important that pupils regulate their emotions. The emotions that they feel when they make an error is underpinned by their Error Learning Orientation - whether they see errors as positive and an opportunity to learn or as a negative thing that brings shame. In this interview Rahel Schmid discusses her paper about emotions pupils feel when they ma

This week find out how you can encourage students to persist with learning and engage with metacognitive strategies when they make mistakes. Dr Maria Tulis talks about her experiments that aimed to find a causal link between beliefs about errors, how these beliefs maintain motivation and how students then adapt their actions to effectively analyse and correct errors. In study two d

This is the 3rd episode in the failure series of podcasts this term. We are staying with the theme of feedback to errors this week. Professor Janet Metcalfe discusses her paper on learning from errors and in particular how one teacher uses an interactive approach, encouraging students to work out why they made an error rather than simply correcting them, and the impact it had on th

When students receive error feedback it usually causes a negative emotional response, this in turn can impact learning. If we could somehow elicit a positive emotional response to error feedback, research suggests that this will increase motivation, enhance the desire to continue on a learning task and promote the use of efficient metacognitive strategies. In today’s podcast with

Failure - a word that is taboo in education and yet is part and parcel of the learning experience. As teachers, dealing with errors in the classroom can fundamentally change so much of the learning experience. The beliefs teachers and students hold about failure and errors changes behaviour and can cause students to persist and grow or to avoid risk and challenge. This term Psychol