How Students Experience Failure in a Content-Gamified Higher Education Course

Abstract

Currently, in traditional higher education courses, the design of failure and its perceived and applied consequences have created an atmosphere of learning where students are often afraid to explore, try, and engage. Furthermore, when the same students do attempt goals and are met with failure, they are often dejected and demotivated. Yet, the opposite has shown to be true in how core design principles in many popular video games regularly encourage a model of constructive failure based on exploration, iteration, and engagement. Connecting these two atmospheres of learning, this study contributes to the conversation of gamification in a higher education course by specifically focusing on how students experience failure within a course that has been designed around core video game principles. In order to explore how students experience failure in a content-gamified higher education course, the researcher completed a phenomenological study with eight student participants, primarily by conducting multiple interviews and collecting written anecdotes. Responses were transcribed and coded through in-vivo and pattern coding, and ten major themes emerged. These themes were examined through the theoretical frameworks for Clifford’s (1984) Constructive Failure Theory and Weiner’s (1985) Attribution Theory. The themes showed that students experienced failure in four stages, ultimately finding the experience to be constructive based on a course design that featured autonomy, recovery, feedback, and accumulation. The study results suggest that failure may be constructive in a higher education course where core video game design principles are employed.