Washington: Don't worry if your child makes
too many errors as a new research has found that learning
becomes better if conditions are arranged such that students
make mistakes.
People remember things better and longer, if they are
given very challenging tests at which they are bound to fail,
a report recently appeared in the Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition said.
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, researchers Nate
Kornell, Matthew Hays and Robert Bjork from University of
California, said.
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.
In one of their experiments, students were required to
learn pairs of "weak associates", words that are loosely
related such as star-night or factory-plant. They had eight
seconds to do so. Of course, almost by definition, they nearly
always failed to generate the correct answer.
In the control condition, students were given 13 seconds
to study the pairs, so that the study time in both conditions
remained the same. The team found that students remembered the
pairs much better when they first tried to retrieve the answer
before it was shown to them.
Bureau Report
First Published: Thursday, October 22, 2009, 16:07