Onderzoekers aan de Duke University hebben nieuwe inzichten verworven in hoe mensen foute kennis al dan niet afleren. Je hebt zelf wel al ervaren hoe moeilijk het is om iets te veranderen dat fout in je brein lijkt te zitten.

Wat blijkt? Eerder onderzoek toonde dat het wel degelijk mogelijk is om fouten te verbeteren door feedback, hypercorrectie genoemd. Als studenten een testvraag verkeerd beantwoorden, hoe zekerder ze waren over hun oorspronkelijk fout antwoord, hoe meer kans er is dat ze het goede antwoord later zullen onthouden als ze gecorrigeerd worden. Dit lijkt in tegenspraak met het buikgevoel van velen.

Dit buikgevoel is deels correct. De onderzoekers stelden vast dat dit wel degelijk klopt als we kijken naar de korte-termijn , maar dat de kans dat de fout terugkomt op langer termijn, eenmaal de correctie vergeten is, veel groter is.

Over de aanpak van het onderzoek:

The researchers gave 50 Duke undergraduate students a 120-question test on basic science information, with questions including: What is stored in a camel’s hump? How many chromosomes do humans have? What is the driest area on Earth? After answering each question, students rated their confidence in their response, and then received the correct answer as feedback. Half the students were retested six minutes later, while the other half were retested one week later.

Students who were retested immediately corrected 86 percent of their errors. As expected, their responses showed a hypercorrection effect — they were more likely to correct errors that they had made with high confidence relative to low-confidence errors.

In contrast, students who were retested one-week later also showed a hypercorrection effect. However, these students only corrected 56 percent of their errors, indicating they had forgotten many of the correct answers that they had learned from the feedback.

When students forgot the correct answer over the one-week delay, the opposite of the hypercorrection effect occurred — the higher their confidence in their initial error, the more likely they were to re-produce that same error on the final test.

Is het dan onmogelijk om fouten definitief te verbeteren? Nee, de onderzoekers stellen:

“Giving students repeated practice with retrieving information has been shown to promote long-term retention of that information. If students practice retrieving the correct information, then they may be able to avoid reverting back to their deeply entrenched false knowledge.” (bron)

Abstract van het onderzoek:

People’s knowledge about the world often contains misconceptions that are well-learned and firmly believed. Although such misconceptions seem hard to correct, recent research has demonstrated that errors made with higher confidence are more likely to be corrected with feedback, a finding called thehypercorrection effect. We investigated whether this effect persists over a 1-week delay. Subjects answered general-knowledge questions about science, rated their confidence in each response, and received correct answer feedback. Half of the subjects reanswered the same questions immediately, while the other half reanswered them after a 1-week delay. The hypercorrection effect occurred on both the immediate and delayed final tests, but error correction decreased on the delayed test. When subjects failed to correct an error on the delayed test, they sometimes reproduced the same error from the initial test. Interestingly, high-confidence errors were more likely than low-confidence errors to be reproduced on the delayed test. These findings help to contextualize the hypercorrection effect within the broader memory literature by showing that high-confidence errors are more likely to be corrected, but they are also more likely to be reproduced if the correct answer is forgotten.