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Mistakes are a powerful learning tool: in children, they are a natural way of testing their limits, understanding their environment and developing skills. Acknowledging and accepting mistakes enables children to develop their critical thinking and ability to adapt :
✏ Note: children imitate adult behavior. As a parent or teacher, showing that you accept and learn from your own mistakes can only benefit them.
In the world of education, the perception of error has undergone a veritable revolution. Once seen as a sign of failure, it is now recognized as an essential learning lever. Modern teachers, armed with this vision, delve into error analysis to decipher their students’ thought processes. This benevolent, empathetic approach doesn’t just gauge knowledge; it reveals students’ real skills and celebrates every step forward.
For the teacher, understanding the typology of errors transforms the vision of assessment. This typology becomes a revealing prism: what are we trying to measure through assessment? Is it the student’s ability to reproduce knowledge, such as the recitation of multiplication tables? Or is it their ability to solve problems using appropriate methods, despite any errors in calculation? Or is it the ability to apply knowledge in other areas, such as using tables in science? These are just some of the questions that guide teachers towards a more nuanced and enriching assessment.
This new way of looking at errors paves the way for tailor-made teaching, adapted to the unique needs of each child. In this innovative learning environment, errors are no longer mistakes to be punished, but opportunities for exploration and growth. Valuing successes as much as areas for progress strengthens students’ confidence in their own abilities and nurtures their desire to actively learn.
For parents, exploring their child’s mistakes at school is a process rich in meaning. It goes beyond simply tracking academic results, opening a window onto how the child approaches and solves problems.
The aim is to decipher what lies behind each result: how did the child approach and solve a problem? What strategy did he use? What result did they obtain? What knowledge, such as mastery of multiplication tables, did he or she call on to achieve it? It’s a journey to the heart of the child’s learning universe, a chance to understand his or her learning and thinking processes, and to help him or her progress.
Exchange with your child, asking him, for example, to explain his process behind a particular result. This will give you an insight into his thought process and strengthen parent-child communication around learning.
Jean-Pierre Astolfi is a French academic. A specialist in the didactics of science, he has highlighted the importance of understanding errors in education. His key work, “L’erreur, un outil pour enseigner”, presents a pragmatic and constructive vision of error, seeing it as a learning opportunity rather than a failure.
Astolfi offers a detailed classification of errors, each accompanied by concrete examples. He also offers avenues of remediation to help adults better support children.
Examples that fall under this error:
Remediation suggestions for the adult:
✓ Have the student rephrase in his or her own words to check that he or she has understood the meaning conveyed by the instruction.
✓ Simplify the vocabulary used. Unless you’re testing vocabulary mastery, the purpose of an instruction is to give an instruction. It must therefore be comprehensible and contain no obstacle to what we really want to assess.
Examples that fall under this error:
Remediation suggestions for the adult:
✓ Regularly propose statements with unnecessary data to train their critical thinking.
✓ Make students explicit what they are going to need and what is unnecessary in the statement.
Example that falls under this error:
Points of remediation for the adult:
✓ Be sure to provide for progressiveness in learning: students generally know how to talk about a subject they’re passionate about, but making a structured presentation that meets formal constraints, on this subject, is not the same thing and requires learning and practice.
✓ Segment the skills involved in assessing a production. For the assessment of a poem, for example, we distinguish between the assessment of the recitation of a text from memory, and the expressiveness with which the poetry was recited, which are 2 totally different aspects, and therefore should not be the subject of a single “mark”.
Examples that fall under this error:
Remediation path for the adult:
✓ Use a diagnostic assessment at the start of the teaching sequence. This is a rapid assessment that gathers students’ initial knowledge and representations, with a view to developing them.
Examples that fall under this error:
Track for adult remediation:
✓ Ensure that the proposed task does not require too much data management, for example, by breaking down the instruction into several subtasks.
✓ Teach students to set out, in note or diagram form, the various data involved in a problem and the approach they plan to use to solve it.
✓ Assess the various skills involved in a production, in several stages. In writing production, for example, text production and spelling management can be assessed at two different times.
Example that falls under this error:
A remediation approach for the adult:
✓ In a problem-solving approach, invite students to represent the situation before embarking on the resolution such as drawing a picture of the problem-situation: what I need to find / what I know / what I’m missing.
✓ Make a diagram of the approach they will use to solve the problem to enable the teacher to assess the relevance of the choice and execution of the approach.
Example that falls under this error:
Track for adult remediation:
✓ Suggest rituals that invite students to draw on knowledge and skills built up in other subjects: “How do you think we could find out how long Louis XIV lived?”
Examples that fall under this error:
Track for adult remediation:
✓ Make sure to stay within the child’s Zone of Proximal Development: not too difficult, not too simple! An optimal error rate would be around 15%.
✓ Use a diagnostic assessment at the start of a teaching sequence to understand where everyone is starting from.
Mistakes are natural and help children test their limits, understand their environment, and develop skills. Mistakes, once often perceived as failure, are now seen as a lever for learning.
According to Astolfi, there are 8 types of error: related to understanding instructions, decoding expectations, misrepresentations, the nature of intellectual operations, cognitive overload, the approaches used, the transfer of skills not carried out, and the inherent complexity of the content.
Encourage self-evaluation, effort and reflection in your child, and set an example by accepting your own mistakes. It’s by understanding mistakes that we foster fulfilling learning. 🌈
