As a junior varsity high school tennis coach I
tell the players that they should look at losing matches as an opportunity to
learn what they can do to improve their game. (I tell myself that too when I
play tennis matches.) If the players can learn from losses they still win in
the long run even though they lost the latest match. (I’d also say they can
also learn from wins by looking at what they can improve. I do this by keeping
a journal in which I rate whether I improved in technique, tactics and mental
parts of my game and rate what needs to be improved.)
The Science Daily article links to a
paper titled The
Eight Five Percent Rule for optimal learning that is fairly technical. The
Science Daily article summarizes:
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 are challenged 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.
So where does the sweet spot lie? According to the new study, to
be published in the journal Nature Communications, it's when failure occurs 15%
of the time. Put another way, it's when the right answer is given 85% of the
time.
So we optimize our learning if we fail about
one out of six times. Good to know!
I believe these results parallel what it takes
to achieve a state of mind that is called Flow, a concept
identified by Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi, a Hungarian-American psychologist. The Wikipedia entry
describes flow as “the mental state of operation in which a person performing
an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full
involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is
characterized by the complete absorption in what one does, and a resulting loss
in one's sense of space and time.”
I say that there is a connection between
optimal learning and flow because achieving a flow state requires facing a task
that challenges you without being daunting. The Positive Psychology
website explains: “an optimal Flow state was created when people tackled
challenges that they perceived to be at just the right level of ‘stretch’ for
their skill sets. In other words, neither too tough nor too easy as to be
boring.”
Putting together the findings on optimal
learning and flow it appears that both need a “Goldilocks” challenge: one that
stretches you to achieve flow and reveals what you need to improve for the next
time.
