# The importance of failure in science education: Interventions to promote STEM motivation through failure > **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON · 2024 · $388,750 ## Abstract Project Summary/Abstract To meet national needs of the future, the United States must increase the production of biomedical college graduates and draw on a broader range of talent, particularly among historically excluded communities (HECs). Yet an alarming proportion of college students who declare STEM majors switch to other majors before graduating. Moreover, students who belong to certain HECs enter STEM at the same rates as their white peers but leave far more frequently: 44% of white students leave STEM before graduation, whereas 58% of Latine and 66% of Black students leave. A seminal study of the reasons students leave STEM found that students frequently cite a fear of failure as important, but failure is rarely included as a topic in STEM coursework or as a focus for interventions. Therefore, a better understanding of the impact of failure and approaches that de-stigmatize and normalize failure is needed to assure greater success and retention of diverse students in the biomedical sciences. Scientists are affected by two types of failure that are natural parts of a career in science—personal setbacks and scientific failures—which influence advancement in academic and professional paths. But many students interpret a failure in college due to academic or personal struggles or due to failed experiments as an indication that they lack the ability to succeed in the biomedical sciences. In reality, when students encounter learning challenges, personal roadblocks, or wrong hypotheses and failed experiments, they must tap into productive failure responses to identify support structures, figure out what went wrong, adjust their approach, and try again. Productive responses to failures can be personal (e.g., a growth mindset; scientific self-efficacy, fear mitigation tools) or actionable, scientific approaches such as troubleshooting an experiment. By learning productive failure responses, students develop problem-solving skills, reasoning, and resilience, which strengthen a sense of belonging and lead to persistence in science. This study hypothesizes that if students are taught about failures experienced by successful scientists or engage in a structured research experience, they will be less discouraged when they experience difficulties or failures. This research will study the effects of an intervention on student failure responses and STEM persistence. The first experiment will test the effect of videos about personal and scientific failures on students’ behaviors and attitudes about failure and STEM persistence. The second will test these videos in two educational contexts, one containing a course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE), which may have synergistic effects with the intervention. To assess their failure responses, students will complete a survey and attempt an impossible scientific task—a biology video game. The analysis will seek to understand the interactions between the video intervention and participation in a C... ## Key facts - **NIH application ID:** 10975316 - **Project number:** 1R01GM155840-01 - **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON - **Principal Investigator:** JO E. HANDELSMAN - **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.) - **Funding institute:** NIH - **Fiscal year:** 2024 - **Award amount:** $388,750 - **Award type:** 1 - **Project period:** 2024-09-01 → 2029-07-31 ## Primary source NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10975316 ## Citation > US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10975316, The importance of failure in science education: Interventions to promote STEM motivation through failure (1R01GM155840-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10975316. Licensed CC0. --- *[NIH grants dataset](/datasets/nih-grants) · CC0 1.0*