Scoping review of the literature on undergraduate engineering student perceptions, attitudes, and emotions on failure

This full paper reports a scoping review of the literature on undergraduate engineering student perceptions, attitudes, and emotions on failure.

Failure is a natural part of the learning process. When facing a failure, students can experience strong emotions and/or reactions, especially negative ones, and must be able to cope with the associated challenges and difficulties. Students’ experiences and reactions will depend on the scale of the failure, e.g., failing a course or dropping out of engineering vs. failing an assignment or a test. Moreover, perceptions and attitudes towards failure can play an important role in determining the type of experience or reaction that a student has. Students having more positive perceptions or attitudes towards dealing with failure (e.g., a growth mindset) are more likely to learn and improve upon their mistakes and demonstrate resilience when faced with setbacks compared to those having more negative perceptions or attitudes (which may result in repeating the behaviours that led to the failure).

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a scoping review of the literature associated with undergraduate engineering students’ perceptions, attitudes, and emotions related to academic failure. To conduct our scoping review, we followed the PICO (population, intervention, comparison, and outcome) and SPIDER (sample, phenomenon of interest, design, evaluation, and research type) frameworks to guide the development of our search clause as well as inclusion and exclusion criteria. We identified several records from Web of Science, Compendex-Inspec, and Scopus. Following a screening of the abstracts and applying our inclusion and exclusion criteria, we retained 50 papers for full text reading. We then gathered and summarized the following information from the 50 papers: aims, objectives, and location of the studies; population; methodology; and outcomes.

Our scoping analysis provides a broad overview of the types of studies conducted and the emerging themes associated with the topic of undergraduate engineering students and failure. Our hope is that it will help guide further research on the topic as well as assist educators create more supportive learning environments that encourage student growth and a more positive mindset when facing challenges and failure.