Students and Fear of Failure

Students and Fear of Failure

From an article written by Vicki Zakrzewski

When it comes to deal with fear of failure, students generally fall into four categories:

1. Success-Oriented Students: These are the kids who love learning for the sake of learning and see failure as a way to improve their ability rather than a slight on their value as a human being. Research has also found that these students tend to have parents who praise success and rarely, if ever, reprimand failure.

2. Overstrivers: These students avoid failure by succeeding—motivated by the fear that even one failure will confirm their greatest fear: "that they’re not perfect".

Because the fear of failure is so overpowering and because they doubt their abilities, Overstrivers will, on occasion, tell everyone that they have very little time to prepare for an upcoming test—and then spend the entire night studying. When they pass the test, this “shows” everyone that they are brilliant because their “ability” trumped the need to extend any effort.

3. Failure-avoiding: These students don’t expect to succeed—they just want to avoid failing. They believe that if they extend a lot of effort but still fail, then this implies low ability and hence, low worth. But if they don’t try and still fail, this will not reflect negatively on their ability and their worth remains intact.

In order to avoid failure that might be due to lack of ability, they do things such as make excuses, don’t participate, and choose near-impossible tasks. However, this can put them into a tricky position when they encounter a teacher who rewards effort and punishes for what appears to be lack of effort or worse. Ultimately, there’s no way out for these students, either they try and fail or they’re punished.

4. Failure-accepting: These are the hardest students to motivate because they’ve internalized failure. They believe their repeated failures are due to lack of ability and have given up on trying to succeed. Any success they might experience they attribute to circumstances outside their control such as the teacher giving them the easiest task in a group project.

Two more points: Both failure-avoiding and failure-accepting students tend to focus on non-academic areas where they can succeed, such as sports or art or even risky behavior. And students who, in general, are motivated by fear of failure tend to have parents who rarely praise success, and instead punish failure. This leads these students to believe that their parents’ love is conditioned upon their academic success.

Thus, it is significant as teachers to understand well the nature of learners and their fear of failure to be able to help them learn from their failures rather giving up and thinking of being incapable individuals.