Learning from mistakes

You learn from your mistakes. (Proverb)

For long time mistakes in learning processes have been considered as a source of disturbance, whose presence should be avoided if possible be corrected early on. But during the last years a productive dealing with mistakes foregrounds more and more in research. Mistakes are thereby conidered as learning opportunities, as long as they are recognized as such, their occurrence is understood and they can be corrected (cf. Oser, Hascher & Spychiger, 1999, Wittmann, 2007). Besides learning from own mistakes, learning from external mistakes play an important role and are in the center of our research.

For a more precise analyses we, among other things, look at the following scientific issues.

• How is learning from external mistakes different to learning from own mistakes?
• What influence does learning from external mistakes have on learners performance, motivation and metakognition?
• Which learning variales (e.g. prior knowledge) have influence on the effectiveness of learning from external mistakes?

A possibilty to integrate learning from extraneous mistakes is the purposeful integration of typical mistakes in learning tasks. Such an approach is pursued with the concept of Tasks-With-Typical-Errors.

The term thereby refers to an elaborated learning task with one (or more) specific task affordances, in which solution one (or more) typical error for that affordance is built in. The learners thus has to find the mistake in the task first, before they can correct the task solution (Melis & Narciss, 2006; Melis & Narciss, 2009).

contact persons: Anja Eichelmann, Susanne Narciss 

Selected Publications

Eichelmann, A., Andrés, E., Schnaubert, L., Narciss, S. & Sosnovsky, S. (2012). Interaktive Fehler-Finde- und Korrektur-Aufgaben. Eine Akzeptanz und Usability-Studie bei Sechst- und Siebtklässlern. In G. Csanyi, F. Reichl & A. Steiner (Hrsg.), Digitale Medien - Werkzeuge für Forschung und Lehre (S. 401-412). Münster: Waxmann.

Schnaubert, L., Andrès, E., Narciss, S., Eichelmann, A., Goguadze, G., & Melis, E. (2011). Student Behavior in Error-Correction-Tasks and Its Relation to Perception of Competence. In C. Delago Kloos, D. Gillet, R. Crespo Garcìa, F. Wild, & M. Wolpers (Eds.) Towards Ubiquitous Learning, Proceedings of the 6th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (pp. 370 - 383). Berlin: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-23985-4_29

Further Publications can be found on the contact persons sites.