We learn best when we fail 15% of the time, according to a study
Learning goes best when people fail 15% of the time, according to a new study.
Educators and educational scholars have long recognized that there is something of a “sweet spot” when it comes to learning. That is, we learn best when we aim to grasp something just outside the bounds of our existing knowledge. When a challenge is too simple, we don’t learn anything new; likewise, we don’t enhance our knowledge when a challenge is so difficult that we fail entirely or give up.
“These ideas that were out there in the education field—that there is this ‘zone of proximal difficulty,’ in which you ought to be maximizing your learning—we’ve put that on a mathematical footing,” says lead author Robert Wilson, an assistant professor of psychology and cognitive science at the University of Arizona.
The ‘85% rule’ of learning
The researchers came up with the so-called “85% Rule” after conducting a series of machine-learning experiments in which they taught computers simple tasks, such as classifying different patterns into one of two categories or classifying photographs of handwritten digits as odd versus even numbers, or low versus high numbers.
The computers learned fastest in situations in which the difficulty was such that they responded with 85% accuracy.