This qualitative research examines design failure within a 5th grade science classroom that embedded engineering design activities. In adhering with a situative learning perspective, the goal of this research was to understand how design failure was portrayed to students through the written and enacted curriculum and in turn, how students described these experiences within a particular context or situation. Data collection included 90 hours of classroom observations, 18 student interviews, one teacher interview, curricular materials, and student artifacts associated with a seven-week science unit on the topic of forces and motion. Data analyses included summative content analysis as well as open-coding procedures designed to identify patterns. Analyses of the research revealed several important findings related to the notion of design failure. First, the written curriculum limited the ways that design failure was portrayed to the students. A primary reason for this was that the curricular materials restricted the emphasis in which engineering design, or even engineering, was presented to the students. Next, the enacted curriculum left the topic of failure unspoken or hidden within the classroom context. The teacher presented the students with implicit notions of failure, such as encouraging them to "try again" despite "challenges" and "difficulties." However, both science investigations and engineering design activities were discussed using these terms, which provided the students with conflicting messages about design failure. Furthermore, the classroom constraints (i.e., time) also provided students with contradictory messages about failure within the context of the classroom. While students received productive messages of persistence and understood the need to "try again," they did not associate these messages with concepts related to design failure. Students descriptions of failure also did not align with conceptualizations of design failure. This could have been due to the fact that they had a limited understanding of the goals of the engineering design challenges or that their definitions of failure were situational in nature. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]