Success and failure for child development students in a technical college

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to determine the correlation between achievement motivation/fear of failure and the difficulty level students select. This will help Technical College teachers to find effective ways to motivate their students and also to expand their perspective to include the possibility that even very fearful and failure prone students can learn to be successful, and that this does not detract from, but can enhance, technical education. This study will revisit the previous studies that were done with young, white, male college students in the 1970’s, this time with older, multi-ethnic, female college students. The subjects were 30 Child Development students in a Technical College. They completed two surveys, The Test of Insight (TI) measured the subject’s need for achievement (nAch), the Test Anxiety Survey measured their degree of test anxiety. After completion of these two tests, students were grouped in four groups from high to low need for achievement and high to low fear of failure. Then they completed a ring toss game where each subject determined the distance they wanted to stand from the peg. This distance was grouped as to the level of difficulty they selected, easy, moderate, or difficult. Pearson’s Correlation and ANOVA were used to analyze the level of correlation between the two groups as they relate to the distance selected. The results were that there was no statistically significant correlation found, except for a negative correlation between achievement and age. In conclusion, even if we can’t predict the difficulty level a student will choose, we can provide meaningful learning opportunities that will not only be relevant and challenging for adult learners, but they can also be at a level at which the student is likely to succeed. Teachers must get to know their students so that they are able to address their learning needs, work with their strengths, encourage them, and consider their learning styles. This paper explored motivation and ways that teachers can help to increase student success. Teachers who emphasize piquing a student’s own natural curiosity, helping the student to get interested in meeting an intellectual challenge, viewing the task as a step towards a personal, long-term goal, and/or other intrinsic motivations, not only reduce the fear of failure in students but also increase the success rate because the students are learning for learning’s sake, not to avoid failure, punishment, or gain teacher approval. This paper also compared behaviorist and constructivist teaching, and found that constructivist teaching was becoming more common and clearly more compatible with appropriate learning experiences for adult learners. Finally, this paper determined if there was a significant correlation between student’s fears of failure or need for achievement and the difficulty levels they choose. This study did not find such a correlation, but further research should be done before drawing any strong conclusions in this area. Key Words: achievement, anxiety, failure, fearful, motivation, success