As we head toward year-end, it’s good to be reminded of important things that may have been forgotten amid the turmoil of 2009. In my case, it’s the value of learning from mistakes. In this Newsweek NurtureShock post, Po Bronson references an experiment by Stanford researcher Carol Dweck – in my view the preeminent researcher looking at students’ views of achievement vs. learning.

Bronson effortlessly summarizes a complex set of experiments by Dweck and co-researcher Jennifer Mangels, and you should read the entire post, but the major point was this: “knowledge-hungry” (in Bronson’s terminology) students learned better from their mistakes than “grade-hungry” students. Knowledge-hungry students were interested in where they had made mistakes so they could learn the correct answer. Grade-hungry students were more concerned simply that they had made a mistake – the error itself obsessed them, not what they didn’t know. As a result, knowledge-hungry students did better on a retest: they learned better.

Even when we leave school and enter the work world, we often remain “grade-hungry.” Companies, frankly, enable and reward this focus with their HR management tools: promotions, numerical performance reviews, “merit” raises. Workers tend to be more concerned about the effect a mistake will have on these measures than on learning from what they did. This is bad for the company, of course. And bad for the worker.

Thanks for reading all year and best wishes for a healthy, less stressful, learning-filled 2010.

(Hat tip Roger Dooley, Neuromarketing)

Related posts:
Don’t try to fail, but try (work of Carol Dweck)


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