Rethinking Our Approach to Mistakes

Take a few minutes and think back to a time when you realized you were wrong about something. What feelings came to mind as you recalled this memory? Most people associate negative and/or unpleasant feelings with being wrong1, using words like dreadful, thumbs down, and embarrassing (Schulz, 2011). According to “wrongologist” Kathryn Schulz, we learn at quite an early age that being wrong is a bad thing and that we should avoid it at all costs. And if you find yourself in the wrong about something, then you're better off keeping your mistake to yourself. But is our negative attitude and outlook about being wrong the most beneficial approach? Not according to Schulz, as well as mounting evidence from a number of other researchers (for example, Metcalfe, 2017; Tulis, Steuer, & Dresel, 2016).

Another, more experiential, source of evidence comes from famous people who learned from their mistakes (Sugar, Feloni, & Lutz, 2015). Take Walt Disney for example. Walt was fired from his Kansas City Star newspaper job early in his career because his editor said he “lacked imagination and had no good ideas,” that is to say, he wasn't creative enough (Sugar, Feloni, & Lutz, 2015). His first animation company quickly went broke and when he tried to get MGM studios to distribute Mickey Mouse in 1927, he was told that the idea would never work because a giant mouse on the screen would terrify women (Schochet, 2010). All I can say is, I am sure Mickey (and Minnie) would argue otherwise! Walt Disney learned from his mistakes, pressing on to not only build an extremely vast and successful empire, but to capture the hearts of young and old alike with his amazing and creative animations, which still live on today!

In her book “Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error,” Schulz (2010) proposes a new way of looking at wrongness. She argues that, of all the things we humans are wrong about, our ideas about error are probably our “meta-mistake: we are wrong about what it means to be wrong.” Being wrong is “far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority”; in actuality, “the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition" and “is a vital part of how we learn and change.” In this light, error is both a given (we will make errors) and a gift (we can learn from them) – being wrong can transform our ideas about the world in which we live, our relationships, and, most profoundly, our understanding of ourselves (Anonymous, 2010).

I first came across Schulz's TED talk (2011) on wrongness in an article by Goodin (2012) entitled, “What is the Secret Behind Successful Students?” What first caught my attention about this article was the quote, located under the picture of an old treasure chest, that opens the article: “When you dig a little deeper into the student experience, you realize many of them are mindlessly drifting from task to task rather than understanding the skills they should be gaining and sharpening from their assignments.” My first thought was, I don't want the students I teach to just drift from task to task, I want them engaged in deeply learning the content, gaining both content knowledge and career readiness skills. My second thought was, I need to read this article to see what solutions the author has to offer. One intriguing remedy offered was for students to learn from their mistakes. The authors then posed the question “How do you teach that?” but then left the question unanswered, similar to a cliffhanger ending in a novel or movie. In this editorial, I would like to try to begin resolving this cliffhanger ending by sharing four ways we can incorporate helping students learn from their mistakes in our courses. I am sure there are many more, but I thought these four could at least get us started.

The Exam Wrapper Assignment: An exam wrapper is a short, reflective activity that asks students to review their performance (and instructor's feedback) on an exam with a focus on adapting their future learning. The exam wrapper is intended to guide student metacognition (Gezer-Templeton, Mayhew, Korte, & Schmidt, 2017). In its most basic form, the Exam Wrapper consists of three foundational questions (Lovett 2013): 1) How did you prepare for the exam?, 2) What kinds of errors did you make on the exam?, and 3) What could you do differently next time? In order to help students learn more directly from their mistakes, we have added another part to the exam wrapper assignment, where students are asked to correct the mistakes they made on the exam. As an incentive, students receive a small number of points for submitting their completed exam wrapper. The act of correcting their errors and receiving points for doing so reinforces the value of learning from their mistakes.

Revise and Review: Several years ago, I was asked to attend a luncheon meeting that was intended to introduce the new Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) program at Illinois. Truthfully, I attended the luncheon because I was asked to. But, boy, was I ever glad that I did. The speaker, Dr. Gail Hawisher, at that time the new Director of the WAC Program, said something that I will never forget: “Your students will learn more if you have them write more.” That's all she had to say and I was in – I wanted my students to learn more. One of the techniques Gail taught me in the WAC workshop I attended was the extreme value of breaking up substantial sized writing assignments, such as a project report, into smaller pieces and having students turn in those pieces one at a time to receive feedback before the assignment was evaluated (reviewed) for credit. In this way, students could revise their writing, correcting their grammatical and, more importantly, their thinking-related errors. This revise and review technique transformed the semester-long assignment in the upper level course I taught (Experimental Foods) from something I dreaded grading to something I enjoyed helping the students work on and improve all semester long. Overall, the finished project reports were 100 times better, and the students and I were 100 times happier (for more details see Schmidt 1999)!

Find and Fix Exam Questions: Typically, exam questions ask students to answer a question or solve a problem. The instructor then grades the problem, determining if the student correctly answered or solved the problem. In a fix and find exam question, the exam question is both posed and solved by the instructor; however, there are one or more intentional errors incorporated into the answer or solution. The student is asked to find and fix the error(s). In regard to Bloom's taxonomy, this is a higher order exam question as it asks the student to evaluate the solution to the problem, not just solve the problem.

Employing Peer Evaluation: Most often students complete an assignment and instructors grade the assignment. But giving students the opportunity to provide feedback to another student's work before they are required to turn it in is a great way for students to identify errors, though, in this case, not their own. One side benefit of peer evaluation is that students learn that everyone, not just them, makes mistakes. This may help students become less self-conscious about their own mistakes. Another advantageous aspect of the peer evaluation process is learning how to give AND receive constructive feedback. Learning to give and receive feedback about our mistakes from others is an important career readiness, as well as life, skill and a mark of maturity. One thing I emphasize with my students is that the peer evaluation process needs to be completely confidential. Confidentiality inspires trust and trust allows for growth, change, and improvement.

Mistakes are part of learning and part of life. We need to help our students develop their ability to think about their thinking (metacognition), including their mistakes, and develop their belief in their ability to accomplish a task (self-efficacy), knowing and feeling good2 about the fact that it will probably not be accomplished mistake-free! A few sayings I have heard about making mistakes that I share with my students at opportune times are: “Making a mistake is not a problem, doing nothing about it is,” “Try not to make the same mistake twice” and “Failure is an event, not a person” (the last saying is attributed to Bruce Lee). Taking a learner-centered approach to students’ mistakes not only helps them learn more, but can also positively impact their engagement in the course, as well as their emotional and noncognitive skills development3, such as building confidence, developing persistence, cultivating independent thinking, and maximizing every learning opportunity (Eva, 2017; Metcalf, 2017; Schmidt, 2019a, Schmidt, 2019b). We just need to remember and help our students remember: “It's okay to ‘mess up’ and spill the milk. There is even beauty in vulnerability. It gives us space to find our strength” (Eva, 2017).