Better Learning From Mistakes

I came across this old cartoon while going through some boxes after a house move and it reminded me of an interesting technique that I started exploring back in 2022 after reading an article titled “Make mistakes on purpose – it can dramatically boost your performance”, written by David Robson in New Scientist, 9 March 2022.

The “derring effect” (a contraction of deliberate erring) means we learn more from making mistakes than by doing something perfectly, which goes against the old adage that while knowledge is learning from your own mistakes, wisdom is learning from the mistakes of others. Perhaps, the research suggests, it is not that wise to avoid making your own mistakes when learning.

Unfortunately, some schools (and perhaps evens parents) seem to drum into young people that they must do everything correctly and not make any mistakes. This can later manifest as a serious fear of failure that discourages them from answering questions in class, submitting coursework that might not be 100% and severe anxiety about exams.

How many times do we as teachers/trainers/mentors say “there is no such thing as a silly question” and yet get that look of fear from the audience that suggests they think all of their questions are very silly and will attract derision from peers and even us. Writing this, I have just remembered an excellent example of how to diffuse this. During a “there are going to be some big changes” speech from a former MD of a previous employer, he asked for questions and said exactly those words. After an uncomfortable silence, my colleague Gail put up her hand and asked “Can you hop?”. Realising what she was doing the MD said yes and then tried to demonstrate that he could, but not very well. From there on the atmosphere relaxed a little and we had a useful discussion.

I have always endeavoured to take this one step further and avoid telling students that their answer is wrong. Nothing puts people off answering questions more than being told, in front of their peers, that they are wrong. It can be tricky, but phrases like “that’s an interesting idea, we’ll come back to that” or “not quite what I was thinking, but thank you for that” or even “I’m sure some of you would agree with that, but the answer I was looking for at this point is…”

However, after reading David Robson’s article I was inspired to develop this approach even further and see if I could get students to learn from mistakes. I had a quick look at the original research to make sure I was not making a big mistake. Reassuringly it reports, “Our results suggest that avoiding errors in learning may not always be most optimal. Rather, deliberate erring is a powerful strategy to enhance meaningful learning.” [Wong, S. S. H., & Lim, S. W. H. (2022). Deliberate errors promote meaningful learning. Journal of Educational Psychology, 114(8), 1817–1831. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000720]

So began my first experiment, I wrote an essay that briefly covered all of the topics I needed my students to revise for an exam. I then went through and introduced thirty or more deliberate, but subtle errors. Prior to issuing mock exam questions I gave them the essay and challenged them to find and correct my mistakes. Not only did they find them, they also found a few unintentional mistakes (now added to my official list of deliberate ones).

Did it work? Well, it’s difficult to say because I didn’t have a control group (which would have been unfair and unethical of course) but anecdotal evidence suggests that it had a positive outcome. Not only did they enjoy the activity and spot more errors than I had anticipated, they could also explain, with a good level of technical eloquence, the corrections. I also noticed that there seemed to be less exam nerves than they had shown the previous year and the results were better across the board. Again, I had no baseline and no control, so perhaps the fact it was their second exam and a different subject accounts for all of the improvement.

So where to go next? I have been inspired to try some other activities by a colleague of mine who has a background in psychology and comes up with really great ideas. To develop their thinking and idea generation he is planning to get students to deliberately do something badly, for example design a really poor user interface for an application. I love that twist, they’ll only be “wrong” if they do it 100% right!

To err is human but also, it turns out, quite useful too.

PS I would like to say thank you to the customer of PCS Direct who sent that cartoon to us after we’d made a bit of a mess of their order. Sadly, the MD of that company totally failed to learn from his past mistakes.