Why mistakes are good for us

Contrary to what many of us might guess, making a mistake with high confidence and then being corrected is one of the most powerful ways to absorb something and retain it. In recent years, cognitive scientists have done gobs of research on how making mistakes help us learn, much of it funded by the federal Institute for Education Science. Some findings make intuitive sense. Some are completely surprising. And many important findings that are relevant to teaching are not making it into the classroom, or penetrating very slowly.

Traditionally, educators and psychologists in the U. American educators, perhaps influenced by Skinner, have tended to see things the same way. Classic studies by psychologists James Stigler of UCLA and the late Harold Stevenson, detailed in their book The Learning Gap , compared videotaped lessons in eighth-grade math in several countries. They found that American teachers emphasized specific procedures for solving problems, largely ignored errors and praised correct answers.

Japanese teachers, by contrast, asked students to find their own way through problems and then led a discussion of common errors, why they might seem plausible and why they were wrong.

Praise was rarely given and students were meant to see struggle and setbacks as part of learning. The difference, the authors believed, is one reason that Japanese students outperform Americans in math. And Americans … strive to avoid situations where this might happen. The American allergy to errors began to ease with a burst of new studies by cognitive psychologists beginning this century.

They showed clear benefits to engaging with mistakes—in both verbal and math tasks. He found that they remembered the target word significantly better if they had made a wrong guess like maple or pine and were corrected than if they were simply given the correct pairing and asked to memorize it. Numerous other studies have confirmed and expanded upon this finding.

And it was Metcalfe and colleagues who showed that the more certain you are of your wrong answer, the better you will learn the right one after being corrected. Why is this? By placing electroencephalogram caps on subjects as they play video games or do other tasks, scientists have identified specific signals in the brain linked to making errors. A second wave, called error positivity Pe for short , comes 50 to milliseconds later and is believed to reflect conscious attention to the error, usually followed by an effort to avoid repeating it.

Past research had shown that these signals relate to academic performance. People with a fixed mindset as measured on a standard questionnaire tend to see errors as signs that they are not good at something. Now that she is 13 years old, I am all the more sensitized to how she responds to mistakes at school, in particular—and how they enhance or detract from her learning.

For many teens, perceived faults loom large as their self-consciousness grows. Kids are watching each other closely both in school and online—judging, comparing, and evaluating—while mental health conditions like anxiety and depression are on the rise. Drawing on research, she argues that students may actually benefit from making mistakes and correcting them rather than avoiding them at all costs.

One famous study of mathematics classrooms in a variety of countries revealed a marked difference between the instructional strategies in Japan versus the United States. Videotapes showed that American teachers focused on the correct procedures for solving problems—primarily ignoring errors and praising students for correct answers only.

Japanese teachers, on the other hand, rarely praised their students and asked them to solve problems on their own. Then, they led discussions of common errors as students explored a variety of pathways to both correct and incorrect solutions. Because Japanese students outperform U. Japanese teachers seem to be embracing the learning struggle by acknowledging mistakes rather than ignoring them.

Teaching methods that center on errors may make learning more challenging but can also be more motivating —potentially enhancing metacognition the ability to think about your thinking and self-efficacy a belief in your capability to accomplish a task. Learn how to help kids overcome fear of failure. Discover how mindfulness can help students cope with failure. Discover a new theory of elite performance. Explore two ways to foster grit. In the direct instruction group, students learned to solve complex math problems with the teacher helping them along the way.

In the productive failure group, however, students struggled and failed at solving problems until the teacher stepped in to help them analyze their failed attempts and find the correct solution. As a result, the productive failure group outscored the direct instruction group on both simpler and more complex problems during a final test.

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