Search results

Student failure in tertiary education costs taxpayers and donors large sums each year. The cost of quality can be substantial, but it can also be a source of significant savings. This study attempts to provide a framework in terms of which these costs can be quantified through the application of the principles of quality costing in tertiary education. An emphasis on quality increases profitability by increasing student throughput and by decreasing the cost of the provision of services. Significant savings are possible if the educational system could achieve greater success by focusing on adding value to those students that are more likely to succeed. If quality costing is made visible in the South African tertiary education system, it could have a profound impact on the products (students) that are delivered to society.

The purpose of this study is to investigate failure in an introductory accounting course. Failure rates are often hard to explain and have a cost to both the individual and to the university. This paper offers insight into this complex matter.

This paper uses data gathered from a survey instrument on self-efficacy beliefs and personal written reflections from students who had previously failed the introductory accounting course to diagnose why students may have failed.

The key finding in this paper is that students are individuals and there can be multiple reasons for failure.

One limitation in this paper is the sample size of six-student reflections. This in itself speaks to the difficultly in researching this area, as students are often not willing to face failure and discuss it.

The main contribution from this paper is an awareness for educators, as failure can occur for multiple reasons. This paper both adds to the literature on failure in accounting courses and helps inform educators of why their students may fail.

It is very challenging to research failure and therefore there is very little work on this area. At this time, the authors have no knowledge of any papers, which address the failure rates in introductory accounting courses from the individual perspective. Therefore, this paper has a unique contribution to the field of accounting education.

This study was based on the perceptions of lecturers and black CTA students at Unisa, a South African distance education university regarding on factors that contribute to black students’ academic success and failure. The main purposes of the study were to help black CTA students to understand the reasons for success and failure better, and to improve lecturers’ teaching approach(es). The research shows that students and lecturers have divergent views on what factors contribute to academic success or failure and the relative importance of the various factors.

This chapter presents empirical evidence on the effects of attributional retraining (AR), a motivation-enhancing treatment that can offset maladaptive explanatory mind-sets arising from adverse learning experiences. The evidence shows that AR is effective for assisting college students to adapt to competitive and challenging achievement settings.

This chapter describes the characteristics of AR protocols and details three primary advances in studying AR efficacy in terms of achievement performance, psychosocial outcomes, and processes that mediate AR-performance linkages. The psychological mechanisms that underpin AR effects on motivation and performance are outlined from the perspective of Weiner’s (1974, 1986, 2012) attribution theory.

Laboratory and field studies show that AR treatments are potent interventions that have short-term and long-lasting psychosocial, motivation, and performance benefits in achievement settings. Students who participate in AR programs are better off than their no-AR counterparts not just in their cognitive and affective prospects, but they also outperform their no-AR peers in class tests, course grades, and grade-point-averages, and are more persistent in terms of course credits and graduation rates.

This paper contributes to the emerging literature on treatment interventions in achievement settings by documenting key advances in the development of AR protocols and by identifying the next steps critical to moving the literature forward. Further progress in understanding AR efficacy will rest on examining the analysis of complex attributional thinking, the mediation of AR treatment effects, and the boundary conditions that moderate AR treatment efficacy.

Advancements and innovation in engineering design are based on learning from previous failures but students are encouraged to “succeed” first time and hence can avoid learning from failure in practice. The purpose of this paper is to design and evaluate a curriculum to help engineering design students to learn from failure.

A new curriculum design provided a case study for evaluating the effects of incorporating learning from failure within a civil engineering course. An analysis of the changes in course output was undertaken in relation to graduate destination data covering 2006 to 2016 and student satisfaction from 2012 to 2017 and a number of challenges and solutions for curriculum designers were identified.

The design and delivery of an innovative curriculum, within typical constraints, can provide opportunities for students to develop resilience to failure as an integral part of their learning in order to think creatively and develop novel engineering solutions. The key issues identified were: the selection of appropriate teaching methods, creating an environment for exploratory learning, group and team assessments with competitive elements where practicable and providing students with many different pedagogical approaches to produce a quality learning experience.

This case study demonstrates how to design and implement an innovative curriculum that can produce positive benefits of learning from failure. This model can be applied to other disciplines such as building surveying and construction management. This approach underpins the development of skills necessary in the educational experience to develop as a professional building pathologist.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the impact of features of personality such as self-confidence and fear of failure on the entrepreneurial orientation (EO) of university students enrolled on entrepreneurial education courses.

Variables related to risk-taking, innovativeness, proactiveness, as well as those related to self-confidence and fear of failure, are taken into account. Using linear regression, the authors investigate how self-confidence and fear of failure affect the EO of university students.

As pointed out by results, both self-confidence and fear of failure are determinants of the EO of university students. Self-confidence has a positive and consistent effect on the three dimensions of EO, whereas fear of failure has a negative effect on EO.

It is not possible to assure that, in the medium and long term, individuals more prone to taking risks, innovating and proactivity will in fact become entrepreneurs. Also, even though it does not affect the relevance of the findings, it must be highlighted that this study has been carried out with a specific sample of students and results may vary in different contexts.

This study offers a new insight relating individual’s self-perceptions and their impact on EO. Equally important, the findings of this paper offer relevant information for the design of academic programs aimed at strengthening students’ personal aspects to promote self-confidence and tolerance to fear of failure as predictors of the EO in this collective.

Esta investigación tiene como objetivo identificar el impacto de las características propias de la personalidad tales como la autoconfianza y el miedo al fracaso en el constructo Orientación Emprendedora (OE) de los estudiantes universitarios matriculados en cursos de educación emprendedora.

A partir de la información obtenida a través de encuestas aplicadas en diferentes programas educativos en la ciudad de Medellín, se consideran variables relacionadas con la asunción al riesgo, la capacidad de innovación y la proactividad, así como variables relacionadas con la autoconfianza y el miedo al fracaso. Usando el modelo de regresión lineal, investigamos como la autoconfianza y el miedo al fracaso afectan la OE de los estudiantes universitarios.

Tomando en consideración nuestras hipótesis de investigación, los resultados indican que tanto la autoconfianza como el miedo al fracaso son determinantes de la OE de los estudiantes universitarios. La autoconfianza tiene un efecto positivo y consistente en las tres dimensiones de la OE, mientras el miedo al fracaso tiene un efecto negativo sobre la OE.

Este trabajo es un estudio exploratorio que investiga la relación de ciertas características de la personalidad con el desarrollo de la OE de estudiantes universitarios en el presente. Por lo tanto, no es posible asegurar que, en el mediano y largo plazo, los individuos más propensos a asumir riesgos, a innovar y a ser proactivos, se conviertan en empresarios. Por otro lado, se debe resaltar que este estudio se realiza con una muestra específica de estudiantes y los resultados pueden variar en diferentes contextos.

Este estudio ofrece una nueva visión que relaciona las autopercepciones individuales y su impacto en la OE. Por otro lado, destaca la necesidad de una mayor investigación que colabore en la comprensión del fenómeno emprendedor utilizando los hallazgos para crear un entorno que respalde la actividad emprendedora en las universidades. Adicionalmente, ofrece información relevante para el diseño de programas académicos orientados a fortalecer los aspectos personales de los estudiantes, con el objetivo de promover la autoconfianza y la tolerancia al miedo al fracaso como predictores de la OE de este colectivo.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how students from Australia, Indonesia and Malaysia differ in their propensity to complain and attitudes to complaining.

A self‐administered questionnaire was designed using established scales to assess respondent reactions to a service failure by a university. The survey was completed by a sample of university students on an Australian university campus. ANOVA was used to compare differences between groups and regression was used to explore the relationship between attitudes and their complaining behaviours.

Australian students have a less positive attitude to complaining than Malaysian and Indonesian consumers. Contrary to expectations, “switching” behaviours were not revealed as a separate dimension of complaining behaviours, however switching was identified with online complaining as part of a new complaining dimension related to taking action outside of the organisation. Malaysian and Indonesian students are more likely to complain in this way. Surprisingly, Indonesian students are less likely to remain loyal to the service provider and Australian students were less likely to “voice” internally to the service provider. Having a positive attitude to complaining was positively related to taking action outside the organisation and to voicing within the organisation, while negative attitudes to complaining were positively related to remaining loyal to the service provider for Australian and Malaysian students.

The findings are limited to consumers of complex services such as University degrees. They are also limited to Indonesian, Malaysian and Australian consumers. Other service contexts, cultures and product failure situations should be investigated in the future.

This research bridges an inherent gap in the literature by exploring the complaining behavior of students in an Asia‐Pacific context. Service organisations can use the findings to better interpret and respond to complaining behavior by students from different nationalities. In particular, it helps faculty and university administrators to manage dissatisfied students from diverse national backgrounds and assists marketers to develop marketing initiatives and communication policies for the student recruitment process.

The purpose of this article is to describe and analyze how three principals attempting to establish effective inclusive schools for students with disabilities identified and learned from failure, with a specific focus on how failure was used to drive school improvement efforts.

This qualitative study involved interviews and observations during one school year in an urban school district in the southwestern United States. Participants varied in their levels of experience and their perceptions about establishing inclusion in their schools. In addition, each school ranged in the length of time working toward implementing inclusion and the relative success of their reform efforts.

This study presents insights into several types of failures with a range of causation, from what we term “unnecessary failures,” to “complex coordination failures” and “trial failures.” In response to these failures, the principals in this study attempted to foster a culture of professionalism and trust by creating avenues for relationship-building that would allow teachers and staff to buy into the inclusive mission of the school. Principals also attempted to build school capacity by working to strengthen teams and pre-existing structures and to cultivate teacher-leaders that could improve communication, motivate others and effectively lead meetings that would encourage authentic collaboration.

Analyzing and learning from instances of failure is an important practice, especially for failures that are unexpected, yet much of the literature on leading from failure exists in business management scholarship, with very limited examples in the area of special education and special education school leadership.

The aim of the chapter is to develop some approaches to turn education, predetermining the quality of human capital, into the most important factor of national inclusive development. This problem is titled by the World Bank Report (2018) as “Learning: to realize education’s promise.” There has been revealed a fundamental contradiction between the two processes: the training technology is improved, the treasury of knowledge is enriched, the scientific progress accelerates, on one side, but on the other side, according to the international Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) study (2015), about 28% of the Russian 15-year-olds, for example, did not master the minimum necessary skills in at least one area of the three (natural science, mathematics, and communication in their native language). Meanwhile the correlation between educational and economic “failures” is high. Reduction in school failure in half (up to 15%) corresponds to the growth of the country’s GDP by 2% at the perspective of 10 years, by 5–6% – in 20 years, and by over 10% – in 30 years. The authors identify and substantiate the most important factor of the low basic knowledge of schoolchildren: it deals with the phenomenon of stable psychological and cognitive barriers in their minds. As a result of this theory, a model of educational consciousness has been developed, which makes it possible to overcome educational failure and to form algorithms for successful learning.

The current literature on the educational progress of immigrant students within the host system is encapsulated in the thesis that these students will face difficulties, and that these difficulties will more often than not lead to a failure to meet the demands of the system for the majority of the immigrant students. An apposite comment by Portes (1996), queried whether the children of immigrants would be able to work their way upwards into “…the middle-class mainstream” or whether they would be blocked in this ascent based on their migrant status, and become part of an “multiethnic underclass or join an expanded multiethnic underclass.” Súarez-Orozco and Súarez-Orozco (1995, 2000) completed this perception by uncovering the implicit viewpoint within which this query was nested. He foregrounded the domination of sensationalism and myth in discussions of the “natural process” of assimilation of minorities. Finally, current discussion on the issue of these so-called at-risk students centres on how they can be made successful at school.