Learning from Errors

Her findings are counterintuitive. To be able to prepare for them, if the objective is to perform in high-stakes scenarios, should not we pursue perfection? Theorists feared that the commission of errors would make it more difficult to learn the appropriate response later on. One of the most famous psychologists of the 20th century, Albert Bandura, believed that only responses should be rewarded. What Metcalfe’s review of the literature suggests is that errors should be encouraged as part of an active exploratory learning process, so long as corrective feedback is provided when students make mistakes. Indeed, Metcalfe cites more than a dozen studies that show students achieve outcomes when they are encouraged to generate answers before being shown the response, rather than simply being shown the reaction. It’s not, although that may sound obvious as you read it now. The majority of the American education system operates under an idea very similar to Bandura’s – namely, that only responses should be rewarded, and that errors should be ignored. The body of research’s findings fly in the face of conventional wisdom. Ensure you remember that it’ll be difficult to genuinely benefit from what this research is telling us.

In actuality, in her review of the literature, Janet Metcalfe makes a persuasive argument that making errors while studying – so long as you receive corrective feedback – results in better outcomes than making no errors in any respect.

The truism that “everybody makes mistakes,” which often carries a tinge of regret, need not lead us to feel disappointed. In the context of learning mistakes appear to be necessary to get the best outcomes. Does that mean since you know you will surely make mistakes you should rush to find out calculus with no training? Obviously not. But it does mean that both pupils and teachers and errors should embrace as part of the learning procedure.

Somewhat surprisingly, the students who benefit most from making errors are the ones who, prior to having their error pointed out, were highly confident their answer was correct. Consequently, it makes sense to avoid doing a bunch of practice questions on a topic you feel you know little about. A better approach would be to study the underlying concepts first, and then attempt a few easy questions to see if you’re getting the hang of them before moving on to a more mixed practice set. For example, say you’re working on problems about triangles but you don’t know the properties of equilateral and isosceles triangles, you are unfamiliar with the idea of special right triangles, and you have never heard of Pythagorean Triplets. Before you torture yourself with a practice set that will inevitably require you to know about these topics, take a moment to learn about them. I personally like YouTube and often use the number of views a video has a proxy for quality, but even a simple Google search can suffice. After you develop a rudimentary foundation, test it out on a few easy problems, and then move on to a more mixed practice set. You don’t need to know everything about these topics to advance to a mixed practice set – indeed, the point of this article is that making errors while you’re learning is beneficial. You just need to learn enough to feel like you should be able to get some questions right. Whether or not you do is not what’s immediately important. The point is that if you get questions wrong after feeling like you’ve learned enough to feel like you should get them right, you’ll have an easier time correcting your mistakes. A tutor can be very helpful in this context, and their goal should be to help you understand what about your thinking led to the mistake, not just to show you how to answer the question correctly.

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