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Learning to be okay with failure should be a central part of the college experience. 1. Often students aren't okay with this because they haven't developed a growth mindset, or the belief that your intelligence/abilities aren’t fixed and that you can get better.
2. Talented/smart students are often the worst at this. I’m currently reading Grit where Angela Duckworth talks about talks about how achievement = talent x effort ². Smart students often aren’t taught how to be gritty, or how to fail, because they’re naturally gifted.
So when something doesn’t come to them right away, they stop trying. They also think that because they’re smart, they deserve an A for showing up, because that’s (often) all they had to do to get an A in HS. This will be a disservice to them for the rest of their lives.
3. This is where, I think, gaming can come in. I am thinking in particular about 2 games here: Dark Souls and Spelunky. While very different on the outset, a lot of the intentionality behind the creation of both is by getting players used to dying and having to start over again.
Derek Yu talks about how this is an important aspect of Spelunky because players have gotten coddled with infinite lives/refilling health etc. and have lost that “old school” gameplay where you died repeatedly -- and that was okay!
Grades should be the same way, and I think that’s why replayability is important. Like what you mention above, if students learn to accept the fact that they are going to fail and not shut down as a result (hello growth mindset), they can learn and get better every time.
The onus is then on us as instructors to make this progress fun and rewarding instead of a grind. That then leads to a couple of important questions:
Are there other incentives we can build into our course design besides grades? How can we reward growth and progress without losing stringency or without holding individuals students to different standards (while still bowing to our Uni's desire for assessment)?
