“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently” ~ Henry Ford
Thomas Edison, with over 1,000 patents to his name, was told by one of his teacher’s early on that he was “too stupid to learn anything.” Albert Einstein, now deemed the father of physics, made mistakes in the first seven proofs of E = mc2. These are just a few of the stories that point to reality of STEM innovation and discoveries — that they are often preceded by multiple false starts and stumbling blocks.
Finding success in looking at failure
So what’s the purpose of pointing out failures? According to a new study paid for by a grant from the National Science Foundation and conducted by Professor Xiadong Lin-Siegler at Teachers College, Columbia University, high-school students can improve their performance and grades in science by studying the failures of famous scientists.
The study took a diverse group of 402 ninth and tenth grade students in New York City high schools and placed them into three groups. One group read an essay outlining the accomplishments of famous scientists like Einstein. The second group read an essay explaining the personal struggles of the scientists. And the third group read about the intellectual struggles, such as failed inventions, of the scientists.
After six weeks, the study found the students in the second two groups were more likely to describe the scientists as people who overcame struggle to succeed. These students saw an improvement in their grades and test scores — including historically low-achieving students. On the other hand, students in the first group were more likely to attribute the scientists’ success to a predisposition for intellectual greatness. These students saw a decline in their grades and test scores.
In other words, two groups saw the possibility for themselves to become great scientists, while one group came to believe they couldn’t ever hope for such success.
Why failure is important in STEM
In an interview with Science Daily, Lin-Siegler explained why the information gathered in this real-life study should be taken into consideration in the classroom. “Many kids don’t see science as part of their everyday lives…Our science curriculum is dehumanized and kids don’t relate to it because it’s just a string of facts rather than knowledge about how the content was created in the first place and how these people met the challenges in their lives.”
Stanford Professor David Freyberg highlighted the importance of failure when it comes to even the most precise of fields. “Engineers learn how to use failure as part of the design process. We don’t want to have dams and bridges that fail — that’s not good. But failure happens. That’s why we have R&D [research and development]. The ‘D’ part is recognition that we will have failure.” He went on to explain, “The notion that learning is a one-pass process — I think the data doesn’t support that. It’s a multi-pass process.”
The bottom line? Success might be the end goal, but the failures on the path to get there should have a place in the discussion as well.