In this paper, we report findings from a larger study that investigated design failure, as a phenomenon, in instructional design (ID) practice from the perspective of ID practitioners. Following an interpretive phenomenological study design, we interviewed 17 ID practitioners working in diverse settings, seeking their stories of design failure.…

Discussions of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in education that do not show an impact regularly focus on the intervention and how it failed to impact on expected measures, with typologies identifying persistent critical points of failure. This paper uses one such RCT--the Integrating English programme--to exemplify the application of a new…

Existing research explains academic course failure with two contrasting narratives; one narrative is negative, and the other is more hopeful. To reconcile these contrasting narratives, this study explored students' perspectives on failing a course. The findings offer practical implications for higher education policy, student-faculty/staff…

Children's social preferences are influenced by the relative status of other individuals, but also by their social identity and the degree to which those individuals are like them. Previous studies have investigated these aspects separately and showed that in some circumstances children prefer high-status individuals and own-gender individuals.…

Background: Despite the growing interest in knowledge brokering as an approach to mobilising knowledge for societal benefit, research has only recently begun investigating the consequences of knowledge brokers' actions. In particular, while it is known that failure can provide a valuable learning experience for individuals and organisations alike,…

Social learning is a fundamental mechanism for efficiently transferring and coordinating norms, skills, and sophisticated cultural information to individuals. However, the psychological mechanisms underlying social learning remain unclear. To investigate this, we recruited adult participants (N = 103), who observed a model's performance in a…

Extant research has consistently demonstrated that both irrational and rational beliefs contribute to the occurrence and persistence of procrastination. Most of these studies have focused on the role of general irrational and rational beliefs, without addressing domain-specific beliefs that may influence academic procrastination. This…

This article examines student perspectives on academic failure during the first year of postsecondary education. We focus on students' personal definitions, responses to, and strategies for embracing and bouncing back from failure in their first year. In this study, students understood academic failure as a negotiation between self and…

Despite some research showing the relation of academic contingent self-worth to academic self-handicapping, evidence for how to improve the situation is limited. To address this research gap, this experimental study (N = 560) examined whether failure mindsets moderated the association between these two variables. Participants were randomly…

When teachers work with students exhibiting academic failure, they may look to factors outside of instruction such as a student's home life or perceived disability as explanations. Placing the locus of control outside of the instructional context becomes a convenient way to escape culpability for unsatisfactory outcomes. A more functional approach…

It is a truth universally acknowledged that pupils do not learn all that they are taught. They may learn something, they may even learn a lot, but it may not be a lot of what we think we have taught them or they may struggle to apply knowledge successfully. In this book, bestselling author Alex Quigley characterises how the long and winding road…

An expansive study shows how politics can work for, not just against, efforts to improve America's schools. The education reform project has always been about making America's schools more effective for the children who attend them. In "Making Politics Work," authors Paul T. Hill and Ashley E. Jochim show that this project cannot succeed…

PDK polls consistently show that parents give their children's schools high marks but are dissatisfied with the performance of public schools nationally. This paradox may be explained by the persistent narrative of failing public schools that has dominated media coverage in the past 50 years. Authors Mark Hlavacik and Jack Schneider tracked the…

Since at least the publication of "A Nation at Risk" (1983), the United States has used competition and top-down approaches in seeking student achievement in the country. Twenty years ago, to create a pathway for the lowest achieving schools in the country to have a clear path for improvement, the turnaround school movement was…

This article is about the death of a graduate school for spiritual formation and theological education. I ask what the death of this school can teach us about teaching theology and religion for the sake of student transformation and more loving pedagogies. I also ask how, when an institution dies, it can die beautifully. The underlying thesis of…