Mistakes make the scientist

Looking back on my first undergraduate laboratory course, one of the most vivid memories I have is accidentally pouring the wrong solute phase into the disposal bin – after spending several hours extracting it. What a mistake. I remember feeling frustrated and foolish, but also oddly amused and curious. I was doing well in my studies overall, but in the lab, I had no choice but to humbly accept the inevitability of making mistakes just like everyone else.

Later, when I was planning my own research, which took place in that very same undergraduate chemistry lab setting, I looked for an angle genuinely interesting to me. I started thinking about the idiosyncrasies of laboratory work, and the topic of mistakes came to mind. As I delved deeper, I realized that no one had really studied how this intrinsic part of lab work, making mistakes, might shape students’ learning engagement, motivation, or emotional experiences. I wanted to know more.

When I presented this idea to my supervisor, his response was: “Oh, that’s an interesting topic, but I’m not sure students make nearly enough mistakes for us to see anything statistically significant.” Despite – or perhaps even because of – his skepticism, I was eager to pursue it.

Just one week into data collection, my supervisor had to go back on his word. It turned out that the students made mistakes constantly – in fact, according to the 3,000 momentary questionnaire responses from students, nearly one-third of all learning situations involved a mistake.

Data collection wrapped up, and I began analyzing the questionnaire responses. Turns out that mistakes do indeed play a significant role in shaping students’ affective experiences. Not only the act of making mistakes, but also the type of mistake, its cause, and the form of help received in solving the mistakes can all impact students’ learning engagement. This can happen through interest, competence beliefs, and experiences of task difficulty in the laboratory.

Interestingly, resolving problems with peers rather than receiving help from a teacher can help maintain students’ sense of capability and promote positive affect. Additionally, individual factors like students’ performance levels or motivational factors might significantly predict their reactions to making mistakes. What remains under investigation is whether it could be possible to, already prior to laboratory sessions, identify factors predicting students’ affective experiences or their error reactions in the laboratory.

Meaningful learning comprises a combination of cognitive (thinking and knowing), psychomotor (connection of body and mind), and affective (feeling) processes. Typically, teachers will scaffold learning, which means that they help students operate at their zone of proximal development by challenging them just the right amount in their tasks. However, this scaffolding typically focuses on the cognitive or psychomotor domains only – helping students to understand the underlying phenomena or mastering technical skills like titration.

I see my research as a call for affective scaffolding in laboratories. When teachers help students deal with their mistakes, they might, for instance, frame them as valuable learning opportunities and emphasize other positive outcomes, while avoiding using mistakes as a basis for negative evaluation. This could foster a more emotionally supportive and resilient learning environment where students are more likely to thrive not only emotionally, but also academically.

Reetta Kyynäräinen
The writer is a Doctoral Researcher in science education, studying students’ affective learning in chemistry laboratories and classrooms. Her research is a part of the EDUCA-flagship, funded by the Research Council of Finland, and the EDUCA-Doc doctoral pilot funded by the Ministry of Education and Culture.