“Everyone fails a math test,” my tutor told me, after I had failed one. I found out, as time went on, that those words were not just a consolation but the truth.
Math, for the vast majority of us non-child-geniuses and prodigies, is very difficult. However, you simply have to get through it. You do the work, and eventually get to understand not only how to get the right answer, and get it in a timely, efficient manner, but why the right answer is right. The mechanics of it have been revealed to you on your much-erased piece of scratch paper. You can now use it to climb further into the series of riddles and mysteries that is math.
You also learn why the wrong answer is wrong. You learn what won’t work, and why.
And now it seems as though other people besides me and my fellow math students see the value in this approach of getting things wrong for a while.
via Scientific American…
Getting It Wrong: Surprising Tips on How to Learn
For years, many educators have championed “errorless learning," advising teachers (and students) to create study conditions that do not permit errors. For example, a classroom teacher might drill students repeatedly on the same multiplication problem, with very little delay between the first and second presentations of the problem, ensuring that the student gets the answer correct each time.
The idea embedded in this approach is that if students make errors, they will learn the errors and be prevented (or slowed) in learning the correct information. But research by Nate Kornell, Matthew Hays and Robert Bjork at U.C.L.A. that recently appeared in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition reveals that this worry is misplaced. In fact, they found, learning becomes better if conditions are arranged so that students make errors.
People remember things better, longer, if they are given very challenging tests on the material, tests at which they are bound to fail. In a series of experiments, they showed that if students make an unsuccessful attempt to retrieve information before receiving an answer, they remember the information better than in a control condition in which they simply study the information. Trying and failing to retrieve the answer is actually helpful to learning. It’s an idea that has obvious applications for education, but could be useful for anyone who is trying to learn new material of any kind.
white pebble 