Erring on the side of caution: Two failures to replicate the derring effect.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Educational Psychology
• Learning Sciences

Background:

• The derring effect suggests deliberate error creation enhances learning.
• Prior research indicated derring effect outperforms other study methods.
• The effect's replicability and generalizability were previously untested.

Purpose of the Study:

• To independently replicate the derring effect.
• To investigate if deliberate error generation improves memory recall compared to copying.
• To test the derring effect in diverse study populations and settings.

Main Methods:

• Two preregistered replication studies were conducted.
• Experiment 1 used a within-subjects laboratory design with term-definition concepts.
• Experiment 2 employed an online study with trivia facts, comparing error-correction to copying conditions.

Main Results:

• No significant difference in cued-recall performance was found between error-correction and copy conditions.
• Bayes factors provided moderate support for the null hypothesis in both experiments.
• The derring effect was not replicated in these independent attempts.

Conclusions:

• The findings challenge the robustness of the derring effect.
• Deliberate error generation may not be a superior learning strategy.
• Further research is needed to understand the role of errors in learning.