[CCoE Notice] ChBE Seminar Series: Allison Godwin, "Connecting the Dots: Supporting Failure as a Learning Opportunity"

[Greenwell, Stephen J]

[William A. Brookshire Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Seminar Series]<https://www.chee.uh.edu >


Connecting the Dots: Supporting Failure as a
Learning Opportunity

Allison Godwin
Associate Professor
Cornell University

Friday, April 18 2025 | 10:30am
Engineering L2D2

LECTURE ABSTRACT
Failure is one of the most impactful ways in which humans learn and is part of the human experience, and yet, it is often stigmatized in education systems that rely on high-stakes assessments. The word failure itself can have wide-ranging variations, from smaller struggles or setbacks to outcomes that dramatically change the course of an individual's life. This talk focuses on failure as an intermediary step in the process of learning, with success as the ultimate goal or endpoint.

Often, engineering students enter college ill-equipped to view failures and challenges as learning experiences, and this skill is rarely an explicit area of instruction or development emphasized in STEM classrooms. Additionally, failure is often unsupported or has high stakes in current educational practices. As such, failure is often avoided or considered a signal that a student may not "have what it takes" to become an engineer. Engineering as a discipline focuses on developing and building solutions (e.g., computer systems, robots, chemical processes, etc.) that work. In order to do so, the practice of engineering involves designing, building, testing, modeling/simulations, and calculations to ensure that a solution addresses the criteria and constraints. All of these efforts are rooted in an underlying ethos, process, and philosophy of failure, and yet failure is notably absent from the engineering curriculum and engineering solutions proposed to support student learning.

This talk will take a retrospective look at classroom-based studies focused on supporting student engineering role identity or motivation that also supported students' engagement with failure as a learning opportunity. The talk will also include a prospective discussion of ongoing work characterizing meaningful failure to personalize engineering learning. Meaningful failure is a novel framework for engineering learning that capitalizes on personalization technology to reward and support students in taking academic risks, embracing uncertainty, and learning from setbacks, to ultimately achieve success, connected to who they are.  Quantitative and qualitative data will be leveraged to discuss the impacts of curricular, classroom culture, and assessment strategies in supporting students' engagement with failure to see themselves as the kind of people who can do engineering and their motivation and belonging in engineering environments.

SPEAKER BIOSKETCH
Allison Godwin, Ph.D. an associate professor and the Dr. G. Stephen Irwin '67, '68 Professor in Engineering Education Research in the Robert Frederick Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell University. She also serves as the Associate Director for the Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility. Her research focuses on how psychosocial factors (e.g., identity, motivation, and belonging) shape student experiences and outcomes in undergraduate engineering education. Dr. Godwin graduated from Clemson University with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Engineering and Science Education. Her research earned a 2016 National Science Foundation CAREER Award focused on characterizing underlying attitudes, mindsets, and approaches to learning to understand engineering students' identity development. She has won several awards for her research including the 2021 Journal of Civil Engineering Education Best Technical Paper, the 2021 Chemical Engineering Education William H. Corcoran Award, the 2022 American Educational Research Association Education in the Professions (Division I) 2021-2022 Outstanding Research Publication Award, and the 2023 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Award for Excellence in Engineering Education Research.

This is an official message sent by the William A. Brookshire Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering.
[William A. Brookshire Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering]<https://www.chee.uh.edu >


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