Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning

by James M. Lang

I made earlier in this chapter that wrong predictions do not seem to harm future learning: Learners do have to receive fairly immediate feedback on the accuracy of their predictions or pretest answers if we don't want those wrong answers to leave a deeper impression than the correct ones. In all of the aforementioned experiments, the learners were given that immediate feedback: in the case of the first experiment, it came within 8 seconds; in the language tutorial, the film continued immediately after students wrote their explanation, which helps explain why the wrong answers they originally gave did not stick.