The Psychology of Failure — Why Mistakes Can Make Us Better Learners

Maybe my basic Educational Psychology lectures from the University of Education, Winneba, can serve a purpose here. I have learnt that failure often produces deeper learning than success. This can be attributed to what psychologists, led by Leon Festinger, often term cognitive dissonance. As a learner, you have beliefs, goals, and expectations, so when the outcome of your learning journey conflicts with your set goals, you will normally feel discomfort after a simple reflective practice. This feeling should lead to a feedback loop where every action you take at those moments should lead to better future learning. This then brings us back to the core of this article, as mentioned earlier: learning from failure; in other words, the act of failing well.

As a student, you are expected to have a growth mindset, and Carol Dweck made us understand in her publications that having a growth mindset requires that you learn from setbacks. This reaffirms that failure generates information that success often does not, making feedback the engine of improvement. This is so because teachers and students often overlook why a student excelled but may spend so much time figuring out why they failed and what can be done to help them improve. This is the action I expect everyone, especially students, to capitalize on, such that every failure in a test must deliberately cause you to undergo a transformative reflection that leads to experiential learning.

But there are psychological barriers to learning from failure, and they are not far-fetched; the psychological pain of being wrong (fear, shame, ego) interferes with extracting lessons from failure. Some will choose defensive thinking and a confirmation bias approach. They will reflect poorly and just accept the failure without further probing, which could lead to better future learning. Another factor, for which the student may sometimes not be blamed, is the need to rush to the next task. More often than not, students complain of being overwhelmed with tasks, and this could result in poor reflective practice after their performance in a given task. These factors explain why students experience the same failure but learn different lessons.