Getting It Wrong
Making mistakes might just be the point
Most of the learners I work with have a quiet rule they don't talk about. It goes something like, don't try until you're sure you can succeed.
It shows up like:
Don't say the word until you can say it well.
Don't write the sentence until you know the sentence is right.
Don't risk being wrong out loud, on paper, in front of anyone, even yourself.
It's a careful rule, often born of careful experiences. And the longer I work in this field, the more I want to gently set it down.
The Science Doesn’t Lie
There is (yet another) a study that’s come out that I've been turning over in my head this week, on something researchers call pretesting. A team in Singapore had three hundred and forty-one adults learn Spanish vocabulary, and compared two ways of doing it. The first group studied the word-and-picture pairs in the way most of us were taught: by looking and rehearsing. The second group was asked to guess at the meanings before any teaching had happened, and was then shown the correct answer afterward. They had a three-in-four chance of being wrong. They did it anyway.
The guessers learned the words better. Across four experiments and several different testing formats, the act of trying first, even unsuccessfully, helped the new vocabulary settle into memory more deeply than the careful, correct studying did. The guessers also reported preferring this method, which I find rather moving.
And it’s not just language-learning! It’s also more than okay to make mistakes when you’re studying. The rich truth is that the mistake made is itself doing some of the work. When a learner reaches for a word they don’t yet have—as ins studying, when a problem gets answered incorrectly—something happens inside the reach. And when the correct answer finally arrives, it lands into ground that is much more ready to receive it.
What Are Students Really Afraid Of?
What I want to add, from the holistic side of things, is this: most of the learners I meet aren't, actually, afraid of being wrong in the abstract. They're afraid of being wrong in front of a system that has historically been unkind about mistake-making. Schools, families, workplaces, and cultures of all kinds have taught some learners that getting it wrong costs more than it should. Neurodivergent learners, learners who experienced racism in classrooms, learners whose first language wasn't the language of instruction, learners who were told early that they were "the smart one" and couldn't afford to fall, learners a lot on the line—all of them have had to develop strategies for staying right. And those strategies, while genuinely protective, can quietly cap how deeply the learning is allowed to go.
So when we talk about mistake-making as a learning strategy, we aren't only talking about the cognitive side of guessing. We're talking about the conditions a learner needs in order to feel safe enough to risk being wrong—the precursor of psychological safety that, thankfully, we’re hearing more and more about in the workplace. That, to me, is where the real practice lives.
Here's where I want to bring all of this home for the studiers among us — the high-schoolers, the university students, the professionals writing licensing exams, the parents helping a kid prepare for finals.
When Practice Tests Work
The most powerful application of pretesting in studying is the practice exam used as a diagnostic. Not as a dress rehearsal once you feel confident, but as the very first thing you do, on purpose, in order to surface what isn't yet known. If your teacher or professor has provided a practice exam, use it that way. If they haven't, you can generate one — feed your syllabus, lecture slides, or course notes into NotebookLM or whichever AI tool you prefer, and ask it to produce practice questions from those materials.
What you're trying to do is be wrong on purpose, in private, with the answer key beside you — not to ace anything, just to surface what isn't yet there. Every question you can't quite answer is doing you a favour, because it's pointing with real precision at the topic, the sub-topic, or the specific skill that needs the next stretch of your attention. Reframed this way, the practice exam works as a map of the territory still ahead of you, rather than a judgement on what you currently know.
This is a real reframe for many learners. We've been taught that practice tests belong to the final stretch, when we are nearly ready, and that getting things wrong on one means we aren't yet good enough. From the holistic side, I'd offer the opposite: a wrong answer early in the process is one of the most valuable pieces of information you will collect during a course. It is so much better to find a gap when you can still close it than to find it on the day that counts.
Try These Learning Strategies Yourself
When you sit down to study something new, try guessing your way into the topic before you read about it—that means notes (and phone)away. Open the chapter you’re re-reading and, before sinking in, write down all that you recall; or for a new chapter, take what you know about the context (from the prior lesson or course outline), and take a risk at predicting what might be in it. Take a stab at a math or physics question before checking the answer. Predict where a lecture or podcast is heading before the speaker gets there.
For the families and educators, when you support someone else's learning, especially a child or a student of yours, notice what your body does when they get something wrong. A small softening on your end can change a great deal on theirs.
And when you find your own self in the small private discomfort of having reached for an answer that turned out to be incorrect, try to remember that the discomfort isn't a sign you shouldn't have tried. It is, in some quiet and unromantic way, the learning beginning to happen.
