LEARN FROM MISTAKES

It’s okay to make mistakes , but what is important is to learn from those mistakes. This is the result   of  a new study from researchers with the Baycrest Rotman Research Institute and the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto.  Andrée-Ann Cyr, led the study that reports benefits of making mistakes for both younger and older adults.
Cyr and her team studied two groups of participants—65 younger adults (average age: 22) and 64 older adults (average age:72).  Participants were given learning and memory tests.  Cyr shared the results in a report in the Journal of Experimental Psychology:  Learning, Memory, and Cognition.
The researchers found that making mistakes while learning may help memory.  All types of mistakes do not help, however.  Researchers found that random guesses do not enhance memory; trial-and-error learning helps memory if those mistakes “are meaningfully related to the answer.”   When they are not meaningfully related, those mistakes can actually hurt memory.   This was true for both groups.
College students can use this information to retain information better and to foster lifelong learning later in life.
                          I personally agree with what researchers have mentioned above. With my years of experience to teach math to  K - 12 students , here in India I  was  initially helping the students while solving the questions on different topics in Mathematics. I found that the result was not up to my satisfaction. What I was doing that I explained them the topic, and solved few questions of different types based on that. Now when they were given the similar type of questions in the exam, majority of them failed to solve.
                          Later on I changed my strategy, instead of help them out directly even for tricky  questions, I insisted that they should read the question again and again and try to get out from the question what is given and what is to be found out. Some times information many not be given directly* , so they had to just think of how the useful and necessary information can be derived from the question. Luckily this method clicked as now students were using their head, committing mistakes and then learning from that.

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