"Well, He Won't Do That Again"

"Well, he won't do that again."

We've all said, or at least thought it. And more often than not (but not always) we're right. Like when a child goofs around on the edge of a fountain on a cold day and falls in. We expect that unpleasant experience to "teach" them a lesson. At least, we hope, it's less likely that they're going to need us to caution them about it the next time. Either they're going to avoid it or they're going to use the information they gathered the last time to exercise a bit more caution

This doesn't mean that we don't care about their tears. Of course, we comfort the child. Dry them off. Get them new clothes. But we don't need to add to the unpleasantness by attempting in our heavy-handed adultness to "drive the point home" with a lot of "So what did we learn today?" style scolding. That just shifts the focus from the actual lessons learned to whether or not the adult is pleased with them, which is a different thing. 

In his book Why We Remember, neuroscientist Charan Rangnath, writes, "We are wired to learn from our mistakes and challenges -- a phenomenon called error-driven learning." It's learning that derives from actively doing (playing on the edge of a fountain) rather than passively memorizing (listening to a safety lecture). If a child really wants to play by the fountain, no amount of our cautioning will teach them as effectively as that error.

Memory is a strange thing. Most of what you will do today will never become part of your memory. The boy who fell in the fountain will likely never fully recall the events leading up to his fall. He will, if necessary, be able to construct a "memory" involving walking to the bus stop with his classmates and riding to the Wooden Boat Center, but that will mostly be his brain determining what "must have" happened rather than what "actually happened." 

Our brains have not evolved for literal recall, which is why we struggle with things like remembering the name of that movie with that actor from that other movie. Or as cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker puts it, "Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness."

No, what this boy will remember of the events leading up to his fall will be largely cobbled together from what is called his semantic memory, which is "our ability to recall facts of knowledge about the world, regardless of when and where that information was learned" and applied "across a range of contexts." In other words, other field trips and bus rides will play at least as large a role in what he remembers.

When he recalls the fall itself, however, and perhaps the immediate aftermath (the shivering, the discomfort, the consequences), that will be called up by his episodic memory, which is "the kind of remembering that allows us to call back, and even reexperience, events from the past." It's still a construction, but one that requires us to "mentally return to a specific place and time." Episodic memory is what we generally refer to when we talk about "our memories." (Although, this too is a construction, or an "imaginative reconstruction.")

Much of what passes for education in our schools involves training children to do something that isn't natural to the human mind, which is precise recall, usually assessed by testing. The problem, as Rangnath puts it is that "tests are optimized for last-minute learning that enhances short-term performance at the expense of retention." And as we know, most of what we store in our short-term memory is gone within days, if not hours.

"Lasting benefits come from error-driven learning, during which we are not always going to be successful," writes Rangnath. "We learn and retain more from the struggle of pushing ourselves to the edges . . . than we do by memorizing and regurgitating on command." This is a big part of why play-based learning, which could really just be another name for error-driven learning, is so powerful.

"Perhaps," concludes Rangnath, "instead of rewarding success, we should normalize mistakes and failures and incentivize constant improvement. Rather than emphasizing mastery, we need to celebrate the struggle -- working to learn, rather than to prove you have learned something."

In this case, he's writing about his university students. Fascinatingly, he is not opposed to testing, but rather believes that we do testing in the wrong way. In his work, he uses tests not as a foundation for grades, but rather as learning tools in which his students are free to be wrong. He's found that "when we look under the hood of the hippocampus . . . we see that the benefits of testing do not come from making mistakes per se, but rather from challenging yourself to pull up what you have learned." The more often we do that, the more likely it is that we will be able to recall it.

"Well, he won't do that again."

The boy tested his world. He fell into cold water on a cold day. The consequences tell him it was a mistake. But this is different than a university test with its precise answers. As adults we might think there is a "correct answer," that the boy has learned to never again goof around on the edge of a fountain. We may even try to drive that point home, but that may not be how he sees it. His urge to goof around on the edge of the fountain may remain, but what he has done, through error-driven learning, is gain information that will make it less likely that he fall in the future.

He may still hop up on that fountain if, say, it's a warm, sunny day when the consequences of a fall won't be so uncomfortable

He may still hop up on that fountain if, say, he feels he has developed a better sense of balance.

He may still hop on that fountain if, say, the adults turn their backs, because, at the end of the day, he was curious about testing a different kind of limit.

Perhaps the worst thing we do in education is make children afraid of being wrong. They worry about bad grades, adult disapproval, or even punishment, instead of being free to struggle toward their own learning. Error-driven learning is play-based learning. It's not the successes that matter, but the pursuit of success that gets us out of bed in the morning. And that's where the learning is.

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