Evidence Base: Deliberate Errors Enhance Learning
- Elizabeth Bowey
- Jan 30
- 2 min read
What? Students making errors, on purpose, will help them learn? Yes!
You are probably familiar with the practice of a teacher creating an error and asking students to find/correct the error... but have you considered getting students to write something that is deliberately wrong and then correcting it themselves?
Research published in 2022 (Wong & Lim) now provides evidence that this approach, called the 'derring effect' is more powerful than spotting and correcting errors you give to them.
'Deliberately committing errors even when one already knows the correct answers produces superior learning than avoiding them, particularly when one’s errors are corrected'
Across two experiments researchers found making and correcting your own errors to be more effective for retention than errorless elaboration such as underlining and concept mapping. A second series of three experiments (Wong, 2022) found that not only did students perform better on recall tests, they were also better able to 'boost transfer of knowledge to dissimilar domains' (Wong, 2022, p1). However, the results were conditional on the students making and correcting their own mistakes, not other peoples.
Altogether, these results suggest that the derring effect is specific to generating incorrect, but not correct, elaborations. Neither does mere exposure to others’ errors nor juxtaposing these errors with the correct responses suffice. Rather, guiding learners to personally commit and correct deliberate errors is vital for enhancing generalization and far transfer of learning to distant knowledge domains (Wong, 2022, p1)
Now, I have to be honest with you, in 2025, another group of researchers in the UK tried to replicate these results with two different experiments and didn't find the same recall benefits (Mera, Modirrousta-Galian, Thomas, Higham & Seabrooke, 2025). They attribute this to cultural differences between UK students and Singapore students.
Educational practices in Asian communities often encourage students to initially attempt to solve problems on their own—an errorbased learning approach... Chinese teachers were significantly more likely to ask students follow-up questions after an error than US teachers. Moreover, Chinese teachers were also more likely than US teachers to openly make students feel comfortable about making errors (Mera, Modirrousta-Galian, Thomas, Higham & Seabrooke, 2025, p25).
This might suggest that students who become more familiar with error based learning are more likely to benefit from the derring effect.
Is this something you could try in your classroom?
Is it worth experimenting with and getting feedback from the students?
What examples can you share?
Such a simple tool could easily become integrated into your classroom practice.
Links/resources
Mera, Y., Modirrousta-Galian, A., Thomas, G., Higham, P. A., & Seabrooke, T. (2025). Erring on the side of caution: Two failures to replicate the derring effect. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
Wong, S. S. H., & Lim, S. W. H. (2022). The derring effect: Deliberate errors enhance learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 151(1), 25.
Wong, S. S. H. (2023). Deliberate erring improves far transfer of learning more than errorless elaboration and spotting and correcting others’ errors. Educational Psychology Review, 35(1), 16.
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