How We Learn from Errors
Jonathan Firth's Memory & Metacognition Updates #92
Recently I touched on the risks of judging a lesson based on the accuracy of the students’ work.
It may seem obvious that fewer mistakes equates to better learning, but sometimes, the opposite is true. Errors in the classroom tend to accompany desirable difficulties (see update #10); when we space out practice or present other challenges, learners find things harder, and their work won’t be perfect.
This leads on to an interesting issue that I’ve been meaning to share with you for a while – the concept of errorless learning.
A traditional assumption across education is that it would be best if learners avoid making any errors at all – that their practice is errorless. Drawing on behaviourist traditions, it was assumed that when learners get things wrong, this would come with a risk that the flawed response will be reinforced, and later repeated. Thus, the error would become an embedded habit, very hard to overcome later.
Accordingly, educators such as Ausubel, Rosenshine and Hunter recommended that teachers avoid having students making any errors in the first place. The way to do so? By progressing in very small steps, so that students only have small amounts of new information to take in and practise (you might recognise this as one of Rosenshine’s principles of instruction).
Metcalfe’s research
There is some sense in the ideas above – an ingrained bad habit can be hard to correct.
However, in a review paper, Janet Metcalfe argued that avoiding errors is unnecessary and can even be counterproductive, as it tends to lead to practice being easy and predictable (Metcalfe, 2017).
I first became aware of Metcalfe’s work through her ‘region of proximal learning’ model of how learners study (see Kornell & Metcalfe, 2005), and she has written widely on metacognition.
Her 2017 paper ‘Learning from errors’ explains how there are real advantages to making an error, even besides the issue of difficulty. An error can be informative, helping a learner to course-correct. Sometimes, you don’t understand something until you get it wrong.
Explicit memory
Metcalfe further explains the issue on this podcast (12 June 2024, ‘Learning from errors’). As she puts it, a mistake can stick in one’s memory as an explicit, episodic memory. These are memories of life events – things that we can recall and reflect on. Recalling such memories can also be useful if students are to think about why something is wrong.
Bear in mind that reflecting on the ‘why’ of a process is part of explanatory questioning (see update #16) - an effective, evidence-based technique in its own right.
Here’s a link to Metcalfe’s paper:
Metcalfe, J. (2017). Learning from errors. Annual Review of Psychology, 68(1), 465–489.
Overall, the big idea in the paper is that schools and education systems have shied away from errors and mistakes, and that this should change.
I’d be interested to hear how this works in your subject. Do your students struggle with habitual errors that are hard to correct? Or could it be the case that if students are challenged with desirable difficulties, rich meaningful tasks and productive struggle, errors are inevitable? Does it depend on the age group?
I hope that was interesting. Have a great week!
Jonathan
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