Ideas / Trial and error
An idea from Sui Learning
Trial and error
Let them guess before you tell them. Wrong guesses are the tuition, and a little frustration is the receipt.
In plain words
Ask "Why do you think that is?" before any explanation. A student who has guessed, even wrongly, has somewhere to put the answer when it comes. Effort is what makes memory. If you hand over the answer the moment a child is stuck, you've done the learning for them.
The research behind it
- Retrieval, effort, and spacing are what make learning last. Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel, Make It Stick (2014), as cited in Sui Learning.
- Students who let a chatbot do their practice scored 17 percent worse on the exam. Hamsa Bastani and others, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025).
Questions this answers
- Should I let my child struggle before helping?
- Is it bad to give students the answer?
- How does productive struggle help learning?
In the book
In Sui Learning: Trial and Error Learning; First Principles.
Read the full answers
Should I let my child struggle before helping?How should children use AI to learn?
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Cite this idea. Trenton Rich, "Trial and error," in Homeschooling to Create High Achievers in All Areas of Life: Sui Learning (2022), suilearn.ing/idea-trial-and-error.html. Free to quote, copy and reuse with credit under CC BY 4.0. The book itself is under normal copyright.