Who Can Afford to Fail? Investigating Science Students' Perceptions of Failure Through the Lens of Their Identities

ABSTRACT Scientists agree that learning to cope with failures is an important skill for science students to develop, and students who participate in science research often have positive outcomes after coping with science failures. However, the experience of failure in undergraduate science education more broadly seems to have an overall negative impact on students, particularly those who hold minoritized identities in STEM settings. Past work centering on failure has rarely directly addressed the role that students’ identities play in shaping students’ coping and outcomes of STEM failure experiences. This leaves the following question unanswered: How do students see their identities as informing their perception of failure in science settings? We asked undergraduate science students enrolled in course‐based undergraduate research experiences to reflect on the relationship between their identities and their view or experience of failure within the course. Guided by hermeneutic phenomenology principles in research design, we used intersectionality theory and phenomenological variant of ecological systems theory in concert to collect and thematically analyze student survey responses. From this, we distilled five novel themes that add to prior work. These themes share how students see their identities as vulnerabilities in encountering failure as well as strengths. Notably, students holding identities that can remain undisclosed recognize the privilege they have in navigating failure, above and beyond those who hold visible minoritized identities.