How making mistakes makes you learn faster | Trajectory Education, Christchurch tuition

I don't like failure. It feels bad and it sucks.

We're all wired to avoid mistakes. Researchers of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) have found that our brains are nearly 80% focused on avoiding pain and only 20% focused on pursuing pleasure.

For school students, making mistakes can be frustrating, stressful and even embarrassing.

But with pain comes a lot of gain. Bizarrely, studies have revealed that making more mistakes (even deliberate ones!) is actually a indicator of success in school students... not to mention, a totally normal part of the learning process.

Mistakes are... good?

In one study involving undergraduates at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), researchers showed students one word from a pair, and asked them to guess the other word. In most, students guessed wrong before being given the correct answer.

However, when re-tested later, students who had made a mistake the first time around actually performed better the second time around, as compared to students who were correct the first time around.

Another study of Year 11 Chilean students shows that students who had a fixed mindset (adverse to failure, avoidant of mistakes) were three times as likely to achieve a test score in the bottom 20%, as compared to students with a growth mindset (embracing failure, accepting of mistakes).

So, mistakes improve learning. How?

1. Inadvertent mistakes

The brain is always trying to predict and understand what’s causing the sensory inputs it receives.

When we make an accidental incorrect prediction, our brain’s reaction to the negative emotion of making a mistake is called a ‘cortical response’. The ‘cortical response’ is the brain updating and correcting its understanding what’s happening, in order to make more accurate predictions in the future.

If students can understand the context and learning behind how they reached an incorrect answer (see: ‘recursive learning’), they can make adjustments to their methodologies accordingly to ensure they don’t repeat it.

2. Deliberate mistakes

Astonishingly, a recent study has found that even deliberate mistakes are good for learning.

Learners who deliberately committed and corrected errors (even when they knew the correct answer) were able to retain and apply information quicker than learners utilising other learning techniques (concept mapping, copying with underlining, etc).

This counterintuitive phenomenon is what’s known as the ‘Derring Effect’. It works because mistakes cause the learner to query how they reached an incorrect answer - regardless of whether or not they thought it was correct.

How can we harness mistakes to learn things faster?

Not all mistakes are equal. Here's our 3 tips for how to approach mistake-based learning.

#1: Make informed mistakes, not random guesses.

Students who make completely random or arbitrary guesses and wind up making a mistake, do not actually learn from that mistake.

Mistakes are only beneficial to learning when students are producing informed mistakes. That is, drawing on some prior knowledge or inference of context in making their guess.

When students just take a stab in the dark, once their mistake is revealed, they have no opportunity to review and adjust the assumptions, deductive process and cognitive inputs that brought them to that mistake.

I've personally found that this pattern of allowing students to make a prediction, and then pointing out the inconsistency between their expectation and the actual outcome (and the reasons), is extremely effective at building their understanding of the big picture behind what they’re learning.

#2: Feedback. Done right.

Who remembers Flappy Bird? Flappy Bird was a game released in 2013 and pulled by its developer 6 months later for being "too addicting".

The game is conceptually very simple: the player has to navigate a bird through obstacles without touching them, by timing the bird’s ‘flaps’. In 2019 an AI engine developed an immaculate playstyle in a matter of hours and achieved a superhuman score of 28,700 points. It did this through failing – again, and again – over 10,000 times.

While this is admirable, for us humans, it is not so much the quantity of failures that is important but the quality. Being told whether you are right or wrong is not enough. It is important, especially for students, that the reasons for a mistake are communicated and understood. This way, the correct answer/approach retains better in memory and improve future performance.

#3: Create a psychologically safe environment to fail.

So often, new students come to me afraid to even attempt a question/problem for fear of getting the answer wrong.

In order for learners to feel comfortable and supported enough to have an ‘educated guess’, a non-judgmental environment needs to be built. This includes helping the learner build a healthy approach to failure.

Also, the more confidence a student has, the faster they learn – regardless of whether that confidence is ill-placed. In one study, students answered a general knowledge questions and also rated their confidence level in their answer. Students who had a higher level of confidence in their mistake were more likely to correct it in the future.

For this reason and many, many others, building student confidence is absolutely crucial.

At Trajectory Education, giving Christchurch students the opportunity to make mistakes in a non-judgmental environment is an important part of our tuition pedagogy. This extends from primary school all the way up to high school (NCEA, IB, Cambridge, Scholarship) and beyond.

Whatever our students' futures hold, developing a healthy and constructive mindset towards mistakes is huge part of their learning journey.