Confident and Wrong: Can Students Learn from Their Mistakes?
by Cindy Nebel
We’re all wrong from time to time. We misremember something or we were taught something factually inaccurate to begin with. It happens. As an educator, I have certainly had students that come to my class with some inaccurate beliefs (see neuromyths). When students find out that they’re wrong about something, how often does that sink in? How often do we learn from our mistakes?
While this is a complex question, today I’m going to share a hot-off-the-presses study with you that looked at one aspect of this issue. In this study, the researchers were interested in learning from errors on tests in particular. When a student really thinks they know the answer and then find out that they’re wrong and are given the correct answer, they often learn MORE than if they were just guessing (1). The surprise of finding out that what they thought they knew was wrong is, well, surprising! And so they’re more likely to remember it later. Researchers call this the hypercorrection effect. But it’s unclear whether students are just memorizing the correct answer to a specific question (as opposed to really integrating it) or how long they will remember that correct answer.
This series of studies was designed to answer those two specific questions (2). Students from a university course were given a pre-test covering lots of the concepts that would be covered during the course. On each question they were asked how confident they were that they were right and they were immediately told the correct answer. Afterward, they were given the exact same test again to see if they corrected those confident wrong answers in the way that is typical in hypercorrection effect studies. Sure enough, when students guessed, they were less likely to learn the right answer than if they thought they knew the answer and were wrong (bummer.).
Means extracted from cited source, Study 1. Colors chosen by Annabelle Nebel (age 4).
At the end of the course, students took another test over the concepts, but this one had some different questions. Here’s an example:
Image from cited source
So the question was whether the same hypercorrection effect would persist on this final test at the end of the semester. And… well… it didn’t. Why not? There are a couple possibilities. One possibility is that students were actually taught the material in class between the tests. So the guesses had a better chance of being correct later on. Or maybe the delay was too long and hypercorrection just doesn’t last that long. Or maybe transfer to a new question type was just too much.
In order to answer some of this, the researchers did the study again, but this time they just did the pre-test and immediately gave students the transfer test. There’s no delay here but it does remove the issue of the material being taught during class and shows whether the hypercorrection effect is just memorization or if it transfers. And here’s what they found:
Means extracted from cited source, Study 3. Colors chosen by Annabelle Nebel (age 4).
What we see here is nearly identical to what they found on the delayed posttest in the original study. What this tells us is that when students are corrected, they don’t just memorize answers; they actually learn and are able to apply that learning to new contexts.
Classroom Application
What does this mean for you? There’s quite a bit of individual variability in the type of feedback educators provide after a test. What this tells us is that exam review is a learning activity. When students find out that what they thought was true wasn’t, they learn from the experience. So give them a chance to be wrong. Let them make errors so that you have the opportunity to correct those errors.
References:
Butterfield, B., & Metcalfe, J. (2001). Errors committed with high confidence are hypercorrected. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 27(6), 1491.
Corral, D., & Carpenter, S. K. (2022). Long-term hypercorrection, return errors, and the transfer of learning in the classroom. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 12(2), 208-229.
