How do PhD students learn from small failures - does the eighty five percent rule of success for optimal learning apply?

Abstract

PhD studies are learning journeys that require self-directed inquiry in the pursuit of increasing one’s
own skills, knowledge, and independence. Supervisors can actively help the students by abetting a
shift from guided learning to independent learning. This can be done by engaging the students in
problem-based tasks that have no easy solutions and can sometimes result in failure. Only failure gives
the opportunity of leaving familiar approaches to find new adaptive solutions to solve the task at hand.
To optimize the learning experience the problem-based task should be designed so that a sweet spot
of difficulty is reached, when the difficulty is just outside our comfort zone (so leaving some space for
small failure experience), yet not too easy to avoid being boring and not challenging. The aim of this
study is to investigate if and how PhD students (and supervisors) value failure experiences to improve
practical skills and reach scientific independence. Furthermore, we were interested in determining the
importance of active guidance by the supervisor to turn a small failure into a learning experience. The
results from this study have shown that all participants perceive failures to be beneficial for effective
learning and that an optimal learning task should be relatively challenging, but a too challenging
assignment can be demotivational and have a negative impact on the learning. Furthermore, an
important point raised was the positive outcome reached when a PhD student is given abundant
freedom to choose tasks and methods and that “no time is wasted”, even when a task is not solved if
the students have learned something from the experience.