Learning by Failure

Thursday, February 18 2010 -

Anyone who has written software for more than about 10 minutes quickly realizes that you learn and remember far more when your design fails than when it succeeds. Apparently the US education system hasn’t quite caught up to the notion that getting something wrong is good for you.

Over at Scientific America there is a new article titled The Pluses of getting it wrong. I’m not sure why it took research to figure this one out.

Personally, I find it disturbing that anyone, especially educators would believe this:

For years many educators have championed “errorless learning,” advising teachers (and students) to create study conditions that do not permit errors.

But then I remind myself just how technologically illiterate a great many educators are and given the decisions and actions I see going on in our schools the above sounds just about on par.

There are some really great educators out there, if only those running things would take a moment to listen and learn from those actually doing the teaching rather than from those who do the “research”.