Failure is one of the most impactful ways in which humans learn and is part of the human experience, and yet, it is often stigmatized in education systems that rely on high-stakes assessments. Engineering students enter college ill-equipped to view failures and challenges as learning experiences, and this skill is rarely an explicit area of instruction or development emphasized in STEM classrooms. As such, failure is often avoided or considered a signal that a student may not “have what it takes” to become an engineer. Engineering as a discipline focuses on developing and building solutions (e.g., computer systems, robots, chemical processes, etc.) that work. To do so, the practice of engineering involves designing, building, testing, modeling/simulations, and calculations to ensure that a solution addresses the criteria and constraints. All of these efforts are rooted in an underlying ethos, process, and philosophy of failure, and yet failure is notably absent from the engineering curriculum and engineering solutions proposed to support student learning.

This talk will describe three studies focused on normalizing failure as a typical process of learning in engineering through 1) a student-centered learning environment to support students’ competence beliefs in a materials and energy balances course, 2) an ecological belonging intervention in introductory engineering courses, 3) the use of mastery-based grading to support student motivation in an introduction to chemical and biomolecular engineering course. Both quantitative and qualitative data will be leveraged to discuss the impacts of curricular, classroom culture, and assessment strategies in supporting students’ abilities to see themselves as the kind of people who can do engineering and their motivation and belonging in engineering environments.

Allison Godwin, Ph.D., is an associate professor and the Dr. G. Stephen Irwin ’67, ’68 Professor in Engineering Education Research in the Robert Frederick Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell University. She also serves as the Associate Director for the Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility. Her research focuses on how identity, among other affective factors, influences diverse groups of students to choose engineering and persist in engineering. She also studies how different experiences within the practice and culture of engineering foster or hinder belonging and identity development. Dr. Godwin graduated from Clemson University with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Engineering and Science Education. Her research earned her a 2016 National Science Foundation CAREER Award focused on characterizing latent diversity, which includes diverse attitudes, mindsets, and approaches to learning to understand engineering students’ identity development. She has won several awards for her research including the 2021 Journal of Civil Engineering Education Best Technical Paper, the 2021 Chemical Engineering Education William H. Corcoran Award, the 2022 American Educational Research Association Education in the Professions (Division I) 2021-2022 Outstanding Research Publication Award, and the 2023 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Award for Excellence in Engineering Education Research.