Deliberate, guided failure in learning through problem-solving

About the Project

Can learning be enriched by embracing failure? Many educational systems shy away from failure-driven learning, emphasizing instruction-first methods. Yet, learning from failure cultivates resilience and adaptability (Sinha & Kapur, 2021; de Jong et al., 2023). Deliberate, guided failure refers to an instructional design that problematizes student understanding by offering them to work with suboptimal problem-solving representations (designed to lead to failures) before formal instruction (Sinha, 2022). I am looking for PhD students in three broad research areas within deliberate, guided failure, as outlined below.

a) Improving the desirability of difficulties during deliberate, guided failure

Students often shy away from challenging and failure-prone learning activities, influenced by their reluctance. Despite short-term performance dips, these activities, such as engaging in deliberate, guided failure prior to formal instruction, can potentially enhance long-term learning. Limited willingness to embrace the inherent challenges of such activities may result from institutional factors, parental influence, and existing pedagogical practices. Yet, no interventions have been proposed to improve these beliefs, emphasizing the need to understand how to make failures and challenges desirable for students to enhance their learning of how to learn. Drawing on motivational tactics and refutational teaching (Zepeda et al., 2020), the goal of this research strand is to design prompts to investigate how deliberate engagement with failures can be enhanced and how students’ desirability towards embracing challenges can be improved. These prompts will confront students with typically (surprising!) counter-evidence on the effectiveness of deliberate, guided failure and provoke opportunistic reflection to increase its perceived relevance.

b) Understanding the causal role of emotions in deliberate, guided failure

Traditional classroom research and practice aims to regulate student emotion by relying on hedonic motives of increasing pleasure and decreasing pain, implicating that students should not dwell on the negative and instead always try to feel better by putting a positive spin on such emotions. However, when designing for learning using deliberate, guided failure, it is important that students distinguish the valence of an emotion from its usefulness in attaining task goals (e.g., shame / happiness is not monotonically bad / good for learning). Grounded in instrumental theoretical accounts of emotion regulation (Tamir, 2016), which emphasize what we feel depends on both pleasure and utility, the goal of this research strand is to carry out studies that will manipulate whether students increase (maintain) or decrease their experience of positively and negatively valenced emotions, and how that impacts learning.

c) Technology to improve the socio-emotional context of deliberate, guided failure

Working on data-rich problems situated within deliberate, guided failure requires understanding of disciplinary formalisms, persisting through frustration and regulating emotions. Lack of socio-emotional support, which makes learning engaging and meaningful, can further aggravate task demands. Drawing on advances in open-domain dialog understanding, multimodal emotion measurement, nonverbal behavior generation and human-like agent design, the goal of this research strand is to examine the potential for developing virtually embodied pedagogical agents (Johnson & Lester, 2016) to provide dynamic cognitive and affective scaffolds during failure-driven learning.

Important Note

We welcome you to have a conversation with Assistant Professor Tanmay Sinha (tanmay.sinha@nie.edu.sg) to discuss this PhD project further. You are strongly encouraged to reach out to him at least 3 months in advance of application deadline (i.e. 25 June 2026) as the process of confirming the supervision and preparing your proposal for application may take longer than you anticipate.

When you email Assistant Professor Tanmay Sinha, please:

1. Introduce yourself
2. Share about your academic background
3. Provide information on your research interests and how it is aligned with this project
4. And how you hope to achieve your PhD aspirations

We regret to inform you that only suitable PhD candidates for this project will be shortlisted for further consideration.

Minimum Entry Requirement

A Bachelor's degree with honours at least at Second Class Upper level, Master's degree in the relevant areas and the ability to pursue research in the candidate's proposed field of advanced study.

Shortlisted applicants will undergo an interview session as part of the selection process.

A valid GRE score is required for applicants who are not graduates of the Autonomous Universities in Singapore. See detailed requirements for English language on competency and GRE requirements here.

Funding Notes

Prestigious scholarships offered by the Nanyang Technological University allows outstanding PhD students to pursue their research endeavours at a world-class university. At NTU, we recognize academic excellence and research potential that will help you focus on making groundbreaking discoveries in your field.

For Scholarships and Awards:

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References

1. Sinha, T., & Kapur, M. (2021). When problem solving followed by instruction works: Evidence for productive failure. Review of Educational Research, 91(5), 761–798.
2. de Jong, T., Lazonder, A. W., Chinn, C. A., Fischer, F., Gobert, J., Hmelo-Silver, C. E., ... & Zacharia, Z. C. (2023). Let's talk evidence–The case for combining inquiry-based and direct instruction. Educational Research Review, 100536.
3. Sinha, T. (2022). Enriching problem-solving followed by instruction with explanatory accounts of emotions. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 31(2), 151–198.
4. Sinha, T., Wang, F., & Kapur, M. (2025). Shame Regulation in Learning: A Double-Edged Sword. Education Sciences, 15(4), 502.
5. Zepeda, C. D., Martin, R. S., & Butler, A. C. (2020). Motivational strategies to engage learners in desirable difficulties. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 9(4), 468–474.
6. Tamir, M. (2016). Why do people regulate their emotions? A taxonomy of motives in emotion regulation. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 20(3), 199–222
7. Johnson, W. L., & Lester, J. C. (2016). Face-to-face interaction with pedagogical agents, twenty years later. International Journal of Artificial intelligence in education, 26, 25–36.