> Skip to content
FEATURED:
  • The Evolution of Race in Admissions
Sign In
  • News
  • Advice
  • The Review
  • Data
  • Current Issue
  • Virtual Events
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
Sign In
  • News
  • Advice
  • The Review
  • Data
  • Current Issue
  • Virtual Events
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
  • News
  • Advice
  • The Review
  • Data
  • Current Issue
  • Virtual Events
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
Sign In
ADVERTISEMENT
Pedagogy Unbound
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Show more sharing options
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
  • Copy Link URLCopied!
  • Print

The Benefits of Doing It Wrong

By  David Gooblar
January 23, 2018
Vitae-Doing It Wrong
iStock

In the early 1970s, Rosalind Driver, then a graduate student in education at the University of Illinois, had a peculiar notion. To understand how children learn important scientific concepts, she argued, we first need to grasp how they see the world before they start school. Children do not come into their first science classrooms as blank slates, with no sense of the natural world or of the way objects move in space. Talking with children, Driver showed, often revealed that they had quite fully developed (if incorrect) ideas about scientific phenomena.

We’re sorry. Something went wrong.

We are unable to fully display the content of this page.

The most likely cause of this is a content blocker on your computer or network. Please make sure your computer, VPN, or network allows javascript and allows content to be delivered from c950.chronicle.com and chronicle.blueconic.net.

Once javascript and access to those URLs are allowed, please refresh this page. You may then be asked to log in, create an account if you don't already have one, or subscribe.

If you continue to experience issues, contact us at 202-466-1032 or help@chronicle.com

In the early 1970s, Rosalind Driver, then a graduate student in education at the University of Illinois, had a peculiar notion. To understand how children learn important scientific concepts, she argued, we first need to grasp how they see the world before they start school. Children do not come into their first science classrooms as blank slates, with no sense of the natural world or of the way objects move in space. Talking with children, Driver showed, often revealed that they had quite fully developed (if incorrect) ideas about scientific phenomena.

Her crucial — and radical — insight was that learning is dependent on preconceptions. We learn by revising our understanding of things.

Reading about her work recently got me thinking about how to make use of the misconceptions that students bring with them to the college classroom. Too often, students are taught to hide their mistakes, to keep quiet if they’re unsure of the answer, to feel ashamed for getting it wrong. But just as Driver’s work showed how important it is to elicit student misconceptions, we should be looking for ways to highlight students’ mistakes so that we — and, more important, they — can learn from them.

By patiently interviewing students about the way they saw the world, Driver provided the first detailed information not just about where students tended to go “wrong” but how. She established a new area of research in science education, laying the groundwork for a great many studies of how students understand important concepts. Reflecting in 1989 on the progress of such studies, Driver, who died in 1997, noted that they illuminated “problems of communication and understanding that exist at the heart of the job of teaching.”

Kimberly Tanner — whose 2005 co-written article on misconceptions in biology education called my attention to Driver’s work — notes that instructors in college science courses don’t invest much time “finding out in depth what students already know and, more specifically, what they do not know, what they are confused about, and how their preconceptions about the world do or do not fit with new information they are attempting to learn.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Given that students learn by discovering that their preconceptions are wrong and need to be revised, we may be severely limiting their opportunities for learning if we have no sense of what they know coming into our classroom. Tanner writes that “explicitly uncovering and addressing students’ prior and alternative conceptions in biology is essential if students are to integrate new ideas into existing conceptual frameworks about how the natural world works as a result of instruction.”

Those “prior and alternative conceptions” become a road map for faculty members — a guide to which concepts an instructor needs to spend more time on to help students understand.

Likewise, for those of us whose classrooms focus on skills (what philosophers call “knowledge how”) more than concepts (“knowledge that”), students’ mistakes offer a similar map. Pay attention to where and when students make mistakes in writing or other skills, and you’ll have a better idea of how to teach them.

The same logic works from a student’s point of view: Making mistakes, even intentionally, can help guide students toward doing something correctly.

I also thought about Rosalind Driver, and her attention to student misconceptions, when I came across a 1987 article, “The ‘Do it Wrong’ Approach to Teaching Writing,” by Gerald Grow, a professor of journalism at Florida A&M University. His first sentence lays out his argument vividly: “Deliberately writing badly can be an effective way to learn to write better, because knowing when it’s bad is an essential element in knowing when it’s good.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Grow’s essay detailed his approach to teaching writing: At various points in the semester, he asked his students to “do it wrong” — to deliberately break writing rules and make mistakes. One assignment asked students to write a page of prose with as many grammatical errors as possible. He also assigned students to write terrible opening paragraphs for a series of article ideas. At another point, he gave his students a list of criteria for good journalistic writing (focus, use of factual detail, paragraph development, etc.), and then asked them to “write a short article that is spectacularly bad in every category.”

What’s the point of all of that deliberate blundering?

Well for one thing, Grow argues, such exercises are fun for students and help to alleviate their fear of failure. The professor is asking them to make mistakes — suddenly it seems OK that they don’t always know the right way to do things.

The do-it-wrong strategy seems to work particularly well with students who resist being taught. “This approach,” Grow wrote, “seems to activate some capricious side of the self and gives it a job and a voice: producing negative examples for the class to enjoy and learn from.” That last bit — that the students share and learn from one another’s deliberate mistakes — is crucial. Each of Grow’s assignments has some collaborative element to it: Students trade papers, try to fix their classmates’ errors, discuss the rules that were broken, and, eventually, try to write the correct way.

Teaching students to “do it wrong” could work in almost any college classroom. Philosophy students can try to create arguments with as many logical fallacies as possible. Mathematics students can construct a solution with a deliberate error and then see if their classmates can spot it. Engineering students can design a bridge that won’t hold more than two people at a time. Each of those exercises could be designed to help students see what the “rules” are, and why they are important.

ADVERTISEMENT

The goal is to hold students’ mistakes up to the light. Especially if led by an instructor who has a good handle on common mistakes, these exercises can focus students’ attention on how such mistakes happen, why they are a problem, and how to prevent them.

Doing it wrong helps to teach skills for the same reason that eliciting misconceptions helps to teach content knowledge. By inviting students to write badly, or perform an experiment incorrectly, or botch an equation’s solution, and then having them share their mistakes, we can get students to think about the process of writing, or performing experiments, or solving equations.

We all know we’re supposed to learn from our mistakes. Why not turn that into a teaching tool?

David Gooblar is a lecturer in the rhetoric department at the University of Iowa. He writes a column on teaching for The Chronicle and runs Pedagogy Unbound, a website for college instructors who share teaching strategies. To find more advice on teaching, browse his previous columns here.

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
David Gooblar
David Gooblar is an assistant professor of English and of gender, women’s, and sexuality studies at the University of Iowa. He was previously associate director of Temple University’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching. His most recent book, The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You About College Teaching, was published by Harvard University Press in 2019. To find more advice on teaching, browse his previous columns here.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
  • Explore
    • Get Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Blogs
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Find a Job
    Explore
    • Get Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Blogs
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Find a Job
  • The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • DEI Commitment Statement
    • Write for Us
    • Talk to Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • User Agreement
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Site Map
    • Accessibility Statement
    The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • DEI Commitment Statement
    • Write for Us
    • Talk to Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • User Agreement
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Site Map
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Customer Assistance
    • Contact Us
    • Advertise With Us
    • Post a Job
    • Advertising Terms and Conditions
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
    Customer Assistance
    • Contact Us
    • Advertise With Us
    • Post a Job
    • Advertising Terms and Conditions
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
  • Subscribe
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Institutional Subscriptions
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Manage Your Account
    Subscribe
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Institutional Subscriptions
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Manage Your Account
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2023 The Chronicle of Higher Education
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin