OOPS! Error Learning in Education: How Differing Error Magnitudes Impact Learning.

Abstract

The current study discusses how errors of differing magnitudes can affect the learning that occurs afterwards. Throughout history, researchers have explored and studied most topics that relate to errors in learning and memory formation. More recent studies have begun to examine how the magnitude of an error affects learning, particularly in motor learning contexts. This paper describes an online experiment designed to determine whether the size of an error during a math task improves participant's ability to later recognize subsequent images. To do this, participants were asked to complete a set of arithmetic questions followed by a screen which informed them of their percent error and a randomized image. Subjects were then asked to complete recognition tasks that involved the images that they had previously seen. We hypothesized that throughout this experiment we would see that the participants with the larger the percent error on the arithmetic task would be more likely to recognize the corresponding image, which could indicate learning. However, the results of this experiment were inconclusive as the results were not statistically significant based on the p-values and correlation analysis. Even though results from this experiment cannot be used to draw concrete conclusions more research in this field can be used as a steppingstone to promote future studies.