How Mistakes Help Students Learn

Guessing is useful for students’ ability to recall information—even when the guesses are wrong.

By Youki Terada

Despite its popularity, memorizing information is one of the least effective learning strategies. While it may seem efficient, students are more likely to forget memorized material if they don’t reinforce their learning with other strategies, and a new study looks at how incorporating guesswork into a lesson can significantly boost students’ ability to recall information.

Why does guessing improve memory? When students try to answer questions on their own—as opposed to when answers are given to them—they engage in productive struggle, which helps them make sense of what they’re learning. Posing questions to students helps them think through a problem, bridging the gap between what they know and what they don’t.

Trying to guess an answer—and getting feedback on how close the answer is—leads to higher recall rates than simply trying to memorize information, a new study found. When trying to memorize lists of words, participants in the study remembered slightly more than half the words. But if they used a trial-and-error approach and guessed what the words were and then got feedback on their guess, they recalled about eight in 10 words.

Full article: https://www.edutopia.org/article/how-mistakes-help-students-learn