How embracing mistakes can improve learning

“Failure is the highway to success,” as John Keats famously didn’t say, seems a popular aphorism in motivational courses today.

But can exposing students to potential failure, or common errors, actually be helpful in learning? Or are we better off preventing them from getting things wrong altogether?

Behaviourist theories suggest that exposure to errors may lead students to make those errors again, and make learning the correct approaches more difficult.

However, a review by Janet Metcalfe (2017) argues that concerns regarding exposure to errors might be overstated. Her review ...