2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This is an empirical full paper for the ERM Division.
This full empirical research paper investigates students’ definitions of failure or struggle in order to create a more student-centered approach to learning. Failure or struggle is an important part of the learning process. However, formal engineering education structures have historically stigmatized failure. Students are expected to “get it” on a prescribed term schedule, high-stakes assessments are the norm, and engineering culture positions efficiency and smartness as primary. Prior work has shown that when failure is intentionally included in classroom experiences, students have deeper learning. However, in prior work, the definitions of failure have been framed by the researchers. An understanding of students' experiences and definitions of failure and their impacts on students’ developing identities as engineers can shape how failure is operationalized in classrooms, and even create opportunities for personalization of failure experiences. In this paper, we examine existing literature definitions of failure and students’ definitions of failure to provide a more robust and participatory framing of this phenomenon. The paper proceeds in three parts. First, we review extant literature defining failure and its manifestations in engineering education contexts to establish a conceptual framework for our study of failure among engineering students. Second, we describe the qualitative component of a mixed-methods study in which we longitudinally interviewed 11 students at two private universities in the Northeast in Spring 2025 about their definitions of and experiences with failure in undergraduate engineering education.
Finally, we synthesize these results to propose a conceptual framework for meaningful failure---framing failure as a positive part of learning to support students in taking academic risks, embrace uncertainty, and learn from setbacks to ultimately achieve success connected to who they are. Our results reveal three categories of experiences that vary in their alignment with current literature-based definitions of failure: Category 1) Those that the literature would define as failure, but which engineering students would not; Category 2) those that both literature and engineering students recognize as failure, and Category 3) those that literature would not define as failure, but which students would. These results provide opportunities for reframing how failure is defined in research and engaged with in curricular design to support opportunities for supported failure that is connected to students’ experiences and understandings.