Help Children Learn by Focusing on Incorrect Answers
A typical American classroom lesson might look something like this:
“What is the most abundant gas in the Earth’s atmosphere?” the teacher asks. Children raise their hands.
“Oxygen?”
“Nope.”
“Carbon?”
“Nope.”
“Hydrogen?”
“Nope.”
“Nitrogen?”
“Yes!” And then the teacher will start a lecture on the properties of the good old N2.
But in the race to get the right answer, to a comfortable place that our perfectionist brains know and love, where everyone’s heart rate can return to normal, we are missing out on an important learning opportunity. Amy L. Eva of the University of California, Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center makes a compelling case for focusing on mistakes , really learning them to help students learn. It turns out that numerous studies show that the more confident you are of the wrong answer, the more likely you are to remember the correct answer after you correct it. Things are holding up better. And the whole learning process turns into a process that becomes productive, even satisfying, instead of being accompanied by anxiety about “what I understood” or “did not understand”.
And yet, Americans seem to have a strong dislike for being wrong . A famous study by psychologists Harold Stevenson and James Stigler looked at the differences between Asian and American students. Here’s how these findings were explained in Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson’s book Mistakes (Not Me) Made :
By the fifth grade, the lowest-scoring Japanese class outperformed the highest-scoring class in America. To find out why, Stevenson and Stigler spent the next decade comparing primary school grades in the United States, China, and Japan. Their epiphany came as they watched a Japanese boy struggle with the task of drawing cubes in three dimensions on a blackboard. The boy lasted forty-five minutes, repeating mistakes as Stevenson and Stigler grew more anxious and embarrassed about him . However, the boy himself was completely out of his mind , and American observers wondered why they felt worse than he did. “Our culture has a high psychological cost for making a mistake,” Stigler recalled, “while in Japan it seems that this is not the case. In Japan, mistakes, misconceptions, confusion [are] a natural part of the learning process. (The boy eventually did the job, much to the delight of his classmates.)
Perhaps this is largely due to the reaction of the teachers. Eva writes about the same study, pointing out that American teachers tend to ignore mistakes in their classrooms and praise students for answering correctly. (Perhaps this is like every lesson you’ve ever been to?) However, in Japan, teachers rarely praised children at all – instead, they learned “different paths to both right and wrong decisions.” No buzzer for wrong answers, no confetti for right ones. This is just part of a large, long and difficult learning process.
One of the ways parents and teachers can help children think about incorrect answers is by giving them the opportunity to presume material before they absorb it. Scientific American provides excellent advice for studying textbooks: Before reading a chapter, try to answer the questions at the end of the book. (Or convert the section headings to questions: “If the heading is Pavlovsk air conditioning, ask yourself what is Pavlovian air conditioning?” ) Yes, you are probably wrong, but the action makes your brain learn when you start reading the material. (For those who don’t have any tests, if you really want to learn a thing or two, try to guess the answer before you google.)
It is also important for parents to model healthy responses to mistakes. When Eva’s daughter was little, she regularly spilled milk in front of her while eating and said: “Oh, come on, it’s okay, let’s take it away!” The sooner we teach children that mistakes are part of life, the more room they will have to find directions that lead to something amazing.