With all of the curricular demands and a focus on preparing for state exams, I am concerned that we do not create situations for students to persevere if they don’t succeed in their first attempts at experiments in science. How do we communicate the value of curiosity and perseverance to high school science students and the notion that repeated “failure” is common on the road to major breakthroughs?
—Noelle, New York, New York
When watching children play video games or teenagers texting at the speed of light, I marvel at how they learned these skills on their own–through trial and error, practice, watching each other, and self-evaluation. You raise a good question: Are students encouraged to use these learning strategies in school?
Students hear failure and mistakes are not an option, with airline pilots and brain surgeons as examples. While I hope pilots and surgeons would not make errors in the cockpit and operating room, I suspect they did make some errors during simulations and supervised training—under controlled circumstances where they see the results of their decisions in a variety of situations. This training provides opportunities to learn how to recognize when things go wrong and to experience many problem-solving and decision-making situations, so they’ll remain calm and collected when things go haywire in real life, as they inevitably do. .
What happens when students make mistakes or when something does not go well the first time? I suspect some teachers use the red pencil to focus on the mistakes and take points off, even when students are learning and practicing new concepts and skills. Do students learn that mistakes are bad in school, perfection is required at all times, and there are no second chances? Perhaps some students are so afraid of being labeled a “failure” they’ve learned it’s less painful to do nothing. It could be helpful if we model how to recognize a mistake or error and what to do about it. Even if we have to make a deliberate error, we can demonstrate how it could be corrected and prevented and what can be learned from it. We could even describe our own attempts at learning something new. (I told my students that if they ever felt frustrated to visualize me in my first aerobics class—what a disaster!)
We should not condone sloppy or careless work, but I wonder if sometimes it would be helpful to allow students to make mistakes. Shouldn’t we encourage them to reflect, ponder, and problem-solve before asking for help? Just as “helicopter parents” hover over their children to prevent mistakes or failure, I think well-intentioned “helicopter teachers” hover over their students and intervene even if students do not ask for (and may not really need) immediate assistance, just a little time to think things through. Of course, teachers must intervene if there are safety issues or when students are genuinely frustrated.
Can we help students learn perseverance if science activities are neatly packaged in one-period chunks rather than opportunities for ongoing investigations? What do students learn about the nature of science if all activities have a single, correct answer or conclusion? It would be helpful for students and teachers to meet scientists (either in person or online) and learn about their day-to-day work. A museum scientist described to my students how his longitudinal research on amphibian populations was taking several years (it was interspersed with other projects). He noted how he revised the project several times and how some data did not seem to “fit,” which led to other research questions.
It’s not necessary to wait until high school to encourage perseverance and curiosity. In a fourth grade class I visited, students were investigating the relationship between volume and temperature. They had made predictions/hypotheses, but as the teacher put their data on the board, it was apparent that they were too varied to see any trends and come to any conclusion. As the teacher tried to think of an explanation, a student remarked, “Maybe we didn’t all do the experiment in the same way.” Other students chimed in with suggestions: they may have read the thermometers incorrectly, perhaps they did not all measure the balloons accurately, or maybe the balloons had tiny holes in them that allowed air to escape. The teacher then joined the discussion about the importance of controls in an experiment and the value of consistency and accuracy in measurement. When the students asked if they could repeat the experiment, she helped them annotate the procedure with their suggestions and promised they could try again. After class, she reflected on the lesson. She said that at first she was disappointed the activity did not work out as planned, but she was excited about the way the students responded. She concluded that learning from a “failed” experiment was a valuable experience. (And later in the year, her class scored well above average on the state science exam!)
A recent blog entry Student Success: Genius or Perseverance? on the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) web site also addresses this topic. Readers, feel free to share your own experiences or other resources, too.