If Ya Don't Know, Now Ya Know: Knowledge and Learning From Mistakes

By Zack on October 23, 2009

A recent Scientific American article has been making the rounds for introducing new research which indicates that people are more likely to retain information if they learn through error. That is, searching for an answer and getting it wrong will help you to remember the real answer once you find it (via Jonah Lehrer).
Students were asked to read the essay and prepare for a test on it. However, in the pretest condition they were asked questions about the passage before reading it such as “What is total color blindness caused by brain damage called?” Asking these kinds of question before reading the passage obviously focuses students’ attention on the critical concepts. To control this “direction of attention” issue, in the control condition students were either given additional time to study, or the researchers focused their attention on the critical passages in one of several ways: by italicizing the critical section, by bolding the key term that would be tested, or by a combination of strategies. However, in all the experiments they found an advantage in having students first guess the answers. The effect was about the same magnitude, around 10 percent, as in the previous set of experiments.

What are the career implications of this? Remember those old commercials, "The More You Know," well, as lame as they were, they're pretty much true. While in college or once you get on the job, you are constantly going to have to keep growing and adapting as the environment and your assignments change around you.

Also, this is pretty good indicator that you shouldn't be afraid to take risks in your career. If we do indeed learn more through error, it never hears to take a calculated gamble here and there. If you succeed great, if you fail, learn from it.

All this also reminds of an excellent chart I came across from Jessica Hagy's This Is Indexed blog (via Flowing Data):

That should make it pretty clear, right? OK, kiddies, that's it for this week. Check on Monday to see our interview with Law Abiding Citizen Director F. Gary Gray. And, of course, another week of blogging. If you haven't yet, get your questions in for Andrew Ross Sorkin and Jared Hess. Have a great weekend ... and learn something!

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While Carr rattled off a

Submitted by lynn1221 on Tue, 07/27/2010 - 4:38am.
While Carr rattled off a number of learned medical scholars and some pretty compelling findings, billig ed hardy bekleidung perhaps new and different doesn’t equate to bad. Information is certainly cycling exponentially faster these days, and there is perhaps a Darwinian reason that those who cycle ideas and innovation through the extraction of meaningful nuggets in fragmented form will end up being the ones rewarded in a global economy. One might even argue that things are cycling so fast that becoming entangled in the “paralysis through analysis” loop would equate to missed opportunities.louis vuitton wallet Perhaps there is a fit of the two sets of theories to be found in what Snowden claims to be the most important of his rules: “We always know more than we can say,tiffanys and we will always say more than we can write down.”
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