Mistakes get a bad rap. People often brush them aside by saying, “I’ll do better next time.” But students who pay close attention to their mistakes actually do learn a task faster than kids who ignore them. Focusing on what went wrong helps us learn, a new study shows.
Hans Schroder is a psychologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing. He and his team wanted to know how people’s brains respond to mistakes. People can ignore a mistake by simply pretending it never happened. Or they can mull it over. They can try to figure out what went wrong and where. Schroder suspected that which response people chose might strongly affect how well they learned.
To find out, the team recruited 123 children, all six to eight years old. This is an important time in a child’s life. It is when most kids are beginning school. How well they do in school can be related to their mindset about learning and intelligence.
A mindset is a particular attitude about a situation. Students who have a “fixed” mindset tend to believe that they are born with a certain level of intelligence. They don’t believe it can ever change. Students with a “growth” mindset, however, think they can get smarter through hard work. Scientists have shown that this mindset can affect how well students learn.
To figure out whether each child had a fixed or a growth mindset, Schroder asked the recruits a series of questions. He…
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