We ask students about their past scientific failure experiences. We also ask them to rate their agreement on statements that help us understand how they define and understand science failures. The last few questions ask about their past experience with science research and collects some demographic information. At no point do we collect any information that will identify students.

If you’re sharing the survey with students through your campus learning management system, we already have language that you can copy and paste into the LMS. So we anticipate this will not take more than 10 minutes of your time.

If you would like to be an expert reviewer of the survey tool, we anticipate that you will spend around 15 minutes on the survey and a 30 minute discussion about the survey with the research team.

We recommend that the survey is offered as an extra credit assignment or for course credit as an alternative assignment (for example, students can complete the survey in place of dropping an assignment if you have that kind of structure built into your course).

Ideally, this would be implemented on a learning management system, where students will then submit something (from the end of the survey) as verification of their completion of the survey. This way, you’ll also be able to keep track of who will receive credit for completion.

Anytime during the Spring 2026 semester! The data we are collecting is not contingent on any class activities or class exams. As such, we don’t require a fixed time for survey dissemination. This would even work as a quick assignment at the end of term if you want to support students in reflecting on their experiences that could also provide them some credit in doing so!

The survey will take students about 15 minutes to complete. We have tested prior iterations of the survey with students and even with longer versions, this was the average time of completion.

The survey that students complete ask students to be reflective about their learning experience and their scientific failures. Instructors who deployed these in Spring 2024 have told us that students really appreciated the opportunity to be reflective and learned from the experience! Future students will benefit through the knowledge gained from this tool used to reframe struggles and failure in science classrooms.

You can reach us anytime via our contact page. We aim to respond quickly—usually within one to two business days. You can also email Sandhya Krishnan directly at skrishnan1@ualr.edu.