Success and Failure on Classroom Tasks: Adaptive Learning and Classroom Teaching

The nature of classroom learning requires students to be adaptive by coping with and modifying stressful situations. The development of adaptive learning enables students to respond flexibly to tasks, to transform and initiate them, and thereby assume control over their learning. This is a valuable outcome of education. Rather than engineer tasks to try to obviate this, teachers should deliberately promote the development of students' adaptive learning within a supportive classroom environment. Presently, educators' conceptions of success and failure in student learning interfere with the enhancement of adaptive learning. So, too, do tasks that are too prescriptive. We describe an alternative conception of classroom learning that emphasizes the constructive qualities of functional failure and the limited benefits of uninformative success. We consider ways teachers and tasks might enhance students' adaptive learning and foster students' understanding that tasks and the approaches they take to them are malleable. Finally, we outline a research agenda to inform practice.