The extensive list of mistakes that I made during my first year of uni include such gems as, not realising that PowerPoint presentations required references and forgetting to complete weekly e-tests multiple weeks in a row.
If you are new to tertiary study or have switched to a new course, the essential ingredient is balance. You should allow yourself to make enough mistakes to learn important lessons, without becoming too complacent.
When I think about using mistakes in a productive way, my mind wanders to codebreaking games. These games include Mastermind (the board game not the TV show), Wordle, and (let’s not forget my favourite) the hacking minigames in Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas.
In Mastermind, one player takes on the role of the codemaster, while the other takes on the role of the codebreaker. The codemaster secretly crafts a sequence of plastic balls, which come in 6 colours. For example, the sequence may be ‘red-red-yellow-blue’. The codebreaker must then deduce, in a limited number of guesses, the colour of each ball in the sequence. The codemaster provides feedback for each guess, thereby allowing the codebreaker to get progressively closer to the correct answer.
Wordle exploits the same basic logic, while swapping arbitrary sequences of colours for words, which must be guessed by a single player. Savvy players will start by guessing words which contain an abundance of vowels and common letters, thereby giving themselves the best chance of guessing at least some of the letters correctly.
In the context of study, you are not dealing with the same level of mystery. Research in cognitive science, for example, has found that carrying out distributed learning, rather than cramming, helps to cement knowledge in our long term memory (Fergus, 2022). Furthermore, testing our ability to use and recall key ideas, which can be achieved through resources such as palm cards, is more productive than simply re-reading content (Fergus, 2022). This relates to the wider issue of ‘deep learning’, which tends to be more conducive to success than surface-level learning, where you are not critically evaluating information (Dattathreya & Shillingford, 2017).
Nevertheless, some study skills are difficult to master without practice and different study strategies may work for different people.
This is where the logic of Wordle, and other codebreaking games, comes in. You may not yet have the knowledge required to be the best student you can be, but you can at least make sure that your mistakes represent sensible attempts to find the methods that work, rather than mere repetitions of methods that you know will not work.
Getting your study out of the way in the week and having weekends off may or may not end up being a viable option. However, even if this strategy does not work, you have learnt something valuable by trying it out. On the other hand, failing to attempt every question on a multiple-choice test puts you in the same camp as the psychopath who picks a ‘z’ on their first round of Wordle.
References
Dattathreya, P., Shillingford, S. (2017). Identifying the ineffective study strategies of first year medical school students. Medical Science Educator, 27, 295–307. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40670-017-0396-2
Fergus, S. (2022). Are undergraduate students studying smart?: Insights into study strategies and habits across a programme of study. Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice, 19(2), 108-123. https://doi.org/10.53761/1.19.2.8
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