The Academic Response-to-Failure Scale: Predicting and Increasing Academic Persistence Post-Failure

Abstract

When students experience failure in the pursuit of a marketing degree (e.g., on a test or a course), do they persist or relent their academic efforts? Relenting can lead to long-term academic failure and severe negative consequences for students, universities, and society. Thus, identifying students prone to relenting and directing resources to help them persist is important. We address this need by leveraging prior research on the response-to-failure construct to develop and validate a new measure: the Academic Response-to-Failure Scale. Two studies validate the measure, and two additional studies show that it predicts post-failure persistence and relenting more effectively than 12 related measures. Because the scale uses students’ chronic cognitive and emotional responses to subgoal failure to predict post-failure relenting, it can be applied to design interventions that modify these responses to improve persistence. A final study tests one such intervention, showing that it improves post-failure persistence, particularly for students who otherwise tend to relent. We provide recommendations on how the Academic Response-to-Failure Scale can be used to identify vulnerable students, to design interventions that can help increase these students’ persistence, and to target those interventions and create meaningfully differentiated learning environments.