The advantages of deliberate errors in promoting college students' memory retention and transfer

Errors, traditionally seen as negative, can serve as productive learning tools in low-stakes contexts. However, it remains unclear whether deliberate erring outperforms retrieval practice-another highly effective strategy-across materials and time intervals.

This study compared deliberate erring, retrieval practice, and copying in terms of immediate/delayed retention and transfer while examining learners' metacognitive evaluations. A copy condition served as a baseline to compare two active learning techniques.

Two experiments with college students used conceptual terms (Exp1, N = 96) and text passages (Exp2, N = 103). Both measured immediate/delayed retention, transfer, and metacognitive judgements across three learning conditions.

In Experiment 1, immediate retention showed only anecdotal evidence for no significant difference between deliberate erring and retrieval practice-both outperformed copying-whereas delayed retention favoured deliberate erring. Transfer performance consistently favoured deliberate erring. In Experiment 2, memory retention did not differ significantly between deliberate erring and retrieval practice (both superior to copying), yet deliberate erring again led to better transfer. Metacognitive evaluations systematically underestimated deliberate erring, favouring copying and retrieval practice instead.

Under equal-time learning, deliberate erring shows consistent advantages over copying in both knowledge transfer and long-term retention, and it demonstrates potential benefits over retrieval practice in knowledge transfer, although the latter finding requires further replication. The study also reveals a metacognitive bias against deliberate erring, providing insights into theories of memory encoding and classroom error intervention strategies.