Freedom to Fail: The Impact of Giving Accounting Students the Chance to Fail at Questions

Abstract

P rior research demonstrates that student learning can be enhanced through self-guided reflection. In particular, promoting students' metacognition and self-efficacy beliefs requires educators to provide students with opportunities to 'be confused', ask questions of themselves and build the resilience fundamental to their future professional lives. However, students cannot be expected to learn to learn; they must be taught how to learn. Additionally, they need to be assisted in identifying what learning strategies are available to them. Having outlined the rationale behind strategies such as student-led learning and student-driven assessment, this paper presents an analysis of student reflections, module evaluations and exam marks, and a comparison of final exam marks before and after a method known as freedom to fail (F2F) was introduced. It was found that the introduction of this approach led to a greater student awareness of learning strategies and improved results.