“Are Online Mistakes ‘Small Stuff?’ Discuss!”

Wednesday, April 13, 2011 16th Annual

TCC Worldwide Online Conference

Ann Reich B.A., M.A., EnglishCriminal Justice Composition Kaplan University areich@kaplan.edu

This Hour: Mistakes, errors, goofs in general, in learning, in

instruction Coping with our own as well as our students’

errors in the online classroom: discuss! The value of errors Quotations to comfort us References

Definitions from Oxford Dictionaries.com :

Error (er·ror) noun A mistake: spelling errors / an error of judgment The state or condition of being wrong in conduct or

judgment: the money had been paid in error the crash was caused by human error

Baseball: a misplay by a fielder that allows a batter to reach base or a runner to advance.

Technical: a measure of the estimated difference between the observed or calculated value of a quantity and its true value.

Law: a mistake of fact or of law in a court's opinion, judgment or order.

Origin:Middle English: via Old French from Latin error, from errare

“to stray, err” 

mistake (mis·take)Pronunciation: /məˈstāk, /noun

• an action or judgment that is misguided or wrong: coming here was a mistake /she made the mistake of thinking they were important

• something, especially a word, figure , or fact, that is not correct; an inaccuracy: a couple of spelling mistakes

Origin: late Middle English (as a verb): from Old Norse mistaka “take in error,” probably influenced in sense by Old French mesprendre

(Oxford Dictionaries.com, 2011).

Ann’s Google Search "types of errors in education"= 145,000,000 hits "error correction in the classroom"= 18,000 hits

(Educators are talking about all this!)

Common Mindsets When One is Wrong

From Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff . . . And It’s All Small Stuff :

“Think about it. Have you ever been corrected by someone and said to the person who was trying to be right, ‘Thank you so much for showing me that I’m wrong and you’re right. Now I see it. Boy, you’re great!’ ” (Carlson, 1997).

What Most of Us Have Already Figured Out:

“Fast-paced, complex or unusual learning tasks interfere with the learning of the concepts or data they are intended to teach or illustrate.

Adults tend to compensate for being slower in some psychomotor learning tasks by being more accurate and making fewer trial-and-error ventures. “

From “30 THINGS WE KNOW FOR SURE ABOUT ADULT LEARNING”

By Ron and Susan ZemkeInnovation Abstracts Vol VI, No 8, March 9, 1984reprinted by the University of Hawaii,http://honolulu.hawaii.edu/intranet/committees/FacDevCom/guidebk/teachtip/adults-3.htm

How Have Errors Been Perceived in Our Classrooms?

By us, the instructors? By other students? What mistakes have we made in correcting

student errors?

Instructors, supervisors, and managers (parents?) can model graceful mistake-acknowledgement. How?

When to let it go; when to correct “Praise publicly; reprimand privately”

“What Have We Done Well in Handling Student Errors?”

--Factual errors: errors in computation, wrong words, incorrect terminology, wrong dates, incorrect methods.

--Errors in reasoning, logical fallacies, “thinking errors.”

--Communication and interpersonal relationships; correcting non-inclusive language/non-politically correct language. The need for “Netiquette.”

“The more scientists understand about cognitive functioning, the more it becomes clear that our capacity to err is utterly inextricable from what makes the human brain so swift, adaptable, and intelligent.”

Kathryn Shultz (2010)"The Bright Side of Wrong"The Boston Globe

The Value of Errors

What Educators Are Saying“Some errors are trivial and some represent a quite profound misunderstanding of the situation. When students produce errors in the process of engaging with mathematics, it can be a moment of learning if the error sets up an occasion of serious exchange and consideration of the ideas involved in making the mistake” (van de Sande & Leinhardt, 2007, p. 228).

What Educators Are Saying, II.

“[T]eachers should employ different and flexible error treatment strategies in accordance with the teaching objectives. . . .” (Xie & Jiang, 2007).

Global vs. Local Errors“Errors that are judged to be less consequential for learning are treated in a different manner than errors that are considered to involve focal goals or objects in the domain” (Littman, Pinto & Solway, 1990; Merrill, Reiser & Landes, 1992 as qtd. in Van de Sande & Leinhardt, 2007, p. 228).

Quotable Quotes“Anyone who has never made a

mistake has never tried anything new.”

Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

“All men make mistakes, but only wise men learn from their mistakes.”

Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

“Embracing fallibility to prevent catastrophic error, embracing fallibility to prevent conflict: These are two hugely worthy goals. But learning to do either one consistently is close to impossible as long as we insist that mistakes are made only by morons, and that an intelligent, principled, hard-working mind is the only backup we need. This is the deep meaning behind the pat cliché “to err is human.” Take away the ability of an intelligent, principled, hard-working mind to get it wrong, and you take away the whole thing.”

Kathryn Shultz (2010)"The Bright Side of Wrong"The Boston Globe

References

Allchin, D. (2001). Error types. Perspectives on Science 9. Retrieved 15 March from www.tc.umn.edu/~allch001/papers/e-types.pdf.

Carlson, R., Ph.D. (1997). Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff: And It’s All Small Stuff. New York: Hyperion.

Error (2011). OxfordDictionaries.com. Retrieved 1 April 2011 from http://oxforddictionaries.com/view/entry/m_en_us1244774#m_en_us1244774

Mistake (2011). OxfordDictionaries.com. Retrieved 1 April 2011 from http://oxforddictionaries.com/view/entry/m_en_us1268450#m_en_us1268450

Shultz, K. (2010). The bright side of wrong. The Boston Globe. Retrieved 22 March 2011 from http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/06/13/the_bright_side_of_wrong/?page=full

Van de Sande, C. & Leinhardt, G. (2007). Help! Active student learning and error remediation in an online calculus e-help community. Electronic Journal e-Learning (5 ) 3. Retrieved 1 March from www.ejel.org/issue/download.html?idArticle=39.

Xie, F. & Jiang, X. (Sept. 2007). Error analysis and the EFL classroom teaching. US-China Education Review. (4)9. Retrieved 3 March 2011 from www.teacher.org.cn/doc/ucedu200709/ucedu20070902.pdf.

Zemke, R. & Zemke, S. (1984). 30 things we know for sure about adult learning. Innovation Abstracts. 6 (8). Rpt. by the University of Hawaii. Retrieved 1 April, 2011 athttp://honolulu.hawaii.edu/intranet/committees/FacDevCom/guidebk/teachtip/adults-3.htm