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Researchers from 麻豆官网鈥檚聽 have known that聽. But in a new study, they wanted to test whether adding AI-generated feedback and prompts that force students to reflect on their mistakes would improve outcomes even more.

The results were surprising: People who spent more time reflecting did not learn more. In fact, they sometimes learned less.

Practice makes perfect

In earlier research,聽, an assistant professor in the HCII, and聽, an HCII project scientist, explored how to keep students practicing in the first place. Using 鈥減ersuasive design鈥� strategies, like small nudges built into learning tools, they helped students push past a common barrier: giving up after failure.

鈥淲hen you get something wrong, a natural thing to do is to give up and move on to do something else,鈥� Carvalho said. 鈥淏ut if you don鈥檛 keep practicing, you don鈥檛 learn.鈥�

The team found that learning by doing and getting personal feedback was more effective than traditional teaching methods, where students listen to a lecture.聽

In that聽, the researchers developed an AI-based learning tool to teach introductory Python programming. Students worked through short coding exercises and received immediate, personalized feedback generated by the system, similar to what a teacher might provide one-on-one. The tool worked even if students had never tried Python before.

In one condition of the experiment, learners were able to move directly from one problem to the next, learning through repeated practice and feedback.

Others were required to slow down. After each problem, they saw their corrected code alongside their original answer and were prompted to type an explanation of what went wrong and why.

The idea was to encourage reflection, a process that Carvalho said has long been thought to deepen learning by helping students actively process their mistakes.

The reflection bottleneck

In the study, adult participants had eight minutes to complete the activity. That meant every minute spent reflecting was a minute not spent practicing. Asher said students could learn a surprising amount in just a few minutes if time is used wisely.

鈥淲hen time is limited, doing more problems, even without reflection, leads to better learning outcomes,鈥� Asher said.

Reflection helped students think more carefully about individual mistakes. But it also reduced how many new problems they attempted and how many new mistakes they could learn from.

鈥淚t鈥檚 a little bit like dwelling on something that went wrong,鈥� Carvalho said. 鈥淎t this stage, that time could instead be spent trying new things and learning new ways to solve problems. We found that the cognitive effort required for reflection didn't translate into better performance. The practice itself was the heavy lifter for learning.鈥�

The motivation gap

Carvalho said that there鈥檚 another secret ingredient to consider. When people are learning something they care about, they don鈥檛 always need extra help.

鈥淪omebody that's trying to learn piano, or dance is less likely to get discouraged by failure because they're intrinsically motivated to do it. They are learning because they really want to,鈥� he said.

But in a typical math class, not every student wants to become a mathematician.聽

鈥淭hey're just trying to get through the work, and so failure is more discouraging,鈥� he said. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a problem teachers have to teach around.鈥�

Rethinking how learning feels

Students don鈥檛 always recognize what works best. In previous studies, some participants reported that practice-first approaches felt 鈥渦nfair鈥� because they weren鈥檛 given explicit instruction before being asked to try problems 鈥� even though the practice and feedback were the instruction, Carvalho said.

鈥淲e all grow up thinking learning means someone tells us things first. When that doesn鈥檛 happen, it feels like we鈥檙e not being taught.聽This 'unfair' feeling is a known phenomenon where high-utility learning, like practice, feels harder and less smooth than lower-utility learning, like watching a video, leading students to misjudge their own progress,鈥� he explained.聽

The results show that students who actively practiced, making mistakes and learning from feedback, consistently outperformed those who passively received information, such as through instructional videos.聽

Asher, once a math teacher himself, said this is something that teachers can incorporate into their lessons now, even without an app or other technology.聽

鈥淒on't feel like you need to explain everything to your students before they start practicing,鈥� he said. 鈥淛ust jump in, let them make mistakes, and use those mistakes as your teaching moments.鈥�

Carvalho and Asher will present their research at the聽. A preprint of their paper,聽, is available now.聽