{"id":3205413,"date":"2025-02-16T08:00:06","date_gmt":"2025-02-16T13:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/?p=8059"},"modified":"2025-02-16T08:00:06","modified_gmt":"2025-02-16T13:00:06","slug":"goals-failure-and-emotions-a-conceptual-framework","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/goals-failure-and-emotions-a-conceptual-framework\/","title":{"rendered":"Goals, Failure, and Emotions: a Conceptual Framework"},"content":{"rendered":"

Researchers can provide guidance to teachers by looking at specific teaching practices<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In last week’s post, for instance, I looked at a study about learning from\u00a0mistakes<\/a>. TL;DR: students learned more from review sessions where they explored their own mistakes<\/em> than those where teachers reviewed ideas<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Or,<\/p>\n

Back in December, I looked at a study about using “pre-questions” to reduce mind-wandering<\/a>. Sure enough, students who answered pre-questions about a topic spent less time mind-wandering than those who didn’t.<\/p>\n

Obviously, these studies might provide us with lots of useful guidance.<\/p>\n

At the same time, this “one-study-at-a-time” approach has its drawbacks. For instance:<\/p>\n

What if\u00a0my<\/em> students (or class) don’t really resemble the students (or class) in the study?<\/p>\n

What if THIS\u00a0study says that pre-questions reduce mind-wandering, but THAT study says they don’t?<\/p>\n

What if THIS study (again) says that pre-questions<\/em> reduce mind wandering, but THAT study says that mindful meditation<\/em> reduces mind-wandering? Which strategy should I use?<\/p>\n

And so forth.<\/p>\n

Because of these complexities, we can — and should — rely on researchers in another way. In addition to all that research, they might also provide\u00a0conceptual frameworks<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong>that help us think through<\/strong> <\/em>a teaching situation.<\/p>\n

These conceptual frameworks don’t necessarily say “do this.” Instead, they say “consider these factors as you decide what to do.”<\/p>\n

Because such guidance is both less specific and more flexible<\/em>, it might be either especially frustrating<\/em> or especially useful<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Here’s a recent example…<\/p>\n

Setting Goals, and Failing…<\/h2>\n

We spend a lot of time — I mean, a LOT of time — talking about the benefits of short-term failure. Whether the focus is “desirable difficulty” or “productive struggle” or “a culture of error,” we talk as if failure were the best idea since banning smoking on airplanes.<\/p>\n

Of course, ask any student about “failure”\u00a0and you’ll get a different answer. Heck: they might prefer<\/em> smoking on airplanes.<\/p>\n

After all: failure feels\u00a0really unpleasent —<\/em> neither desirable nor productive, nor cultured.<\/p>\n

In a recent paper<\/a>, scholars Ryan Carlson and Ayelet Fishbach explore the complexity of “learning from failure”: specifically, how failure<\/em> interefers with students’\u00a0goals<\/em>.<\/p>\n

To create a conceptual framework around this question, Carlson and Fishbach create two concept pairs.<\/p>\n

First<\/strong>: they consider the important distinction between goal\u00a0setting<\/em> and goal striving<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Happily, those terms mean just what they say.<\/p>\n

When I decide that I want to learn Spanish, or strengthen my friendships, or stop drinking caffein, I am\u00a0setting<\/em> a goal.<\/p>\n

When I decide to enroll in a Spanish class, schedule more frequent dinners with pals, or purge my kitchen of all my coffee clutter, now I’m goal\u00a0striving<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This pair helps us think through the big category “goals” in smaller steps.<\/p>\n

Second<\/strong>: Carlson and Fishbach consider that both\u00a0emotional<\/em> barriers and\u00a0cognitive<\/em> barriers can interfere with goal setting<\/em> and goal striving.<\/em><\/p>\n

The resulting conceptual possibilities look like this:<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

The grid created by these conceptual pairs allows us to THINK differently about failure: both about the problems<\/strong> that students face, and the solutions<\/strong> that we might use to address them.<\/p>\n

Troubling Examples<\/h2>\n

Having proposed this grid, Carlson and Fishbach explore research into its four quadrants. I’ll be honest, resulting research and insights frequently alarmed me.<\/p>\n

For instance, let’s look at the top-left quadrant: “emotional barriers during goal setting.”<\/p>\n

Imagine that one of my students contemplates an upcoming capstone project. She wants to set an ambitious goal, but fears that this ambitious target will lead to failure.<\/p>\n

Her\u00a0emotional<\/em> response during\u00a0 goal setting<\/em> might prompt her to settle for an easier project instead.<\/p>\n

In this case, her emotional response shuts down her thinking before it even started. As Carlson and Fishbach pithily summarize this situation: “people do not need to fail for failure to undermine learning.”<\/p>\n

YIKES. (Suddenly, the whole “desirable difficulties” project sounds much less plausible…)<\/p>\n

Or<\/strong>, top right (emotional barriers\/goal striving): it turns out that “information avoidance<\/strong>” is a thing.<\/p>\n

People often don’t want to learn results of medical tests — their emotions keep them from getting to work solving a potential health problem.<\/p>\n

So, too, I can tell you from painful experience that students often don’t read the comments on their papers. When they’re disappointed with a grade, they don’t consistently react by considering the very feedback that would help them improve — that is, “strive to meet the goal of higher grades.”<\/p>\n

Or<\/strong>, lower right (cognitive barriers\/goal striving).\u00a0Carlson and Fishbach describe a study — intriguingly called “The Mystery Box Game.”<\/p>\n

Long-story short: in this game, learning how to fail is more beneficial than learning about one path to success. Yet about 1\/3 of participants regularly choose the\u00a0less beneficial path<\/em>\u00a0— presumably because “learning how to fail” feels too alarming.<\/p>\n

Problems Beget Solutions?<\/h2>\n

So far, this blog post might feel rather glum: so much focus on failure!<\/p>\n

Yet Carlson and Fishbach conclude their essay by contemplating solutions. Specifically, they use a version of that grid above to consider solutions to the cognitive and emotional barriers during goal setting and goal striving.<\/p>\n

For example:<\/p>\n

    \n
  • “Vicarious learning”: people learn more from negative feedback when it’s directed at someone else.<\/li>\n
  • “Giving advice”: counter-intuitively, people who give advice benefit from it at least as much as those who receive it. So, students struggling with the phases above (say: cognitive barriers during goal striving) might be asked for advice on how to help another student in a similar situation. The advice they give will help them.<\/li>\n
  • “Counter-factual thinking”: students who ask “what if” questions (“what if I had studied with a partner? what if I had done more practice problems”) bounce back from negative feedback more quickly and process it more productively.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    Because I’ve only recently come across this article, I’m still pondering its helpfulness in\u00a0 thinking about all these questions.<\/p>\n

    Given the optimism of “desirable difficulty\/productive struggle” in our Learning and the Brain conversations, I think it offers a helpful balance to\u00a0understand and manage\u00a0these extra levels of realism.<\/p>\n

    \n

    Carlson, R. W., & Fishbach, A. (2024). Learning from failure.\u00a0Motivation Science<\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Researchers can provide guidance to teachers by looking at specific teaching practices. In last week’s post, for instance, I looked at a study about learning from\u00a0mistakes. TL;DR: students learned more from review sessions where they explored their own mistakes than those where teachers reviewed ideas. Or, Back in December, I looked at a study about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":6787,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[66,242,216],"class_list":["post-3205413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lb-blog","tag-desirable-difficulty","tag-emotions","tag-goals"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3205413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3205413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3205413\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3205413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3205413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3205413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}