Erroneous Examples

Element · All elements
Evidence · 10 claims (4 for, 5 mixed, 1 against) · 5 studies (2 causal, 1 quant-synthesis, 1 review, 1 associational), q2–q3 · 2 of 5 report an effect size · 9 claims rest on one study

Description

Erroneous examples are worked examples that intentionally contain a mistake for learners to identify, explain, and correct. They are useful when the design goal is to make misconceptions visible and strengthen conceptual discrimination, not just demonstrate a correct procedure.

Design Implications

Context

Requirements

• A correct comparison standard: Learners need criteria, prior knowledge, or a correct model to evaluate the error.
• Explanation prompts: The activity should ask what is wrong, why it is wrong, and how to repair it.
• Instructional safety: Learners need to treat errors as analyzable, not shameful.

Constraints

• Absolute novices may be confused: Without a baseline model, learners may encode the wrong procedure.
• Trivial mistakes do little: The error should illuminate a real misconception, not a typo.

Target Learners

• Learners with enough prior knowledge to critique a partially wrong solution.

Target Learning Goals

• Strengthen conceptual understanding, misconception detection, and self-monitoring.

Affordances

• Error Analysis
• Worked Examples
• Explaining Their Thinking

Claims

• Erroneous examples improve conceptual understanding by forcing comparison with correct models. [+S]
• The delayed erroneous-examples advantage replicated at one school but was not statistically significant at the other [+W]
• In the acquisition of negative knowledge, erroneous examples outperformed correct examples [+W]
• Erroneous examples were beneficial only in combination with elaborated feedback, not with corrective feedback alone [~W]
• Erroneous examples show no general learning benefit over correct examples in most comparisons, but outperform them for negative knowledge in some studies [~W]
• The delayed erroneous-examples benefit holds for both low and high prior knowledge students [+W]
• Students like problem solving more than erroneous examples and find its interface easier, though it yields weaker delayed learning [-W]
• Correlations between the number of prompt mistakes and number of messages sent were non-significant or weak, giving little evidence that mistake count influenced prompting effort [~W]
• Prior knowledge moderates the effectiveness of erroneous and contrasting erroneous examples, with low-prior-knowledge learners benefiting in several studies but findings contradictory [~W]
• Time on task does not explain the erroneous-examples delayed learning advantage [~W]

Related Elements

• Worked Examples
• Feedback
• Conceptual Questioning

Patterns That Use This Element

• Mastery Learning
• Guided Discovery Learning

Examples

• Students inspect a flawed algebra solution and explain where the reasoning breaks.
• Learners review a paragraph with a weak claim-evidence link and revise it to meet the rubric.
• Pair erroneous examples with prompts that require learners to identify, explain, correct, or reflect on errors, while monitoring complexity to avoid overload

Key Sources

• Durkin, K., & Rittle-Johnson, B. (2012). The effectiveness of using incorrect examples to support learning about decimal magnitude. Learning and Instruction, 22(3), 206-214. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2011.11.001
• Siegler, R. S. (2002). Microgenetic studies of self-explanation. In N. Granott & J. Parziale (Eds.), Microdevelopment: Transition processes in development and learning. Cambridge University Press.

Page metadata

Field	Value
type	element
id	erroneous-examples
title	Erroneous Examples
description	Erroneous examples are worked examples that intentionally contain a mistake for learners to identify, explain, and correct.
status	review
canonical	True
generated	by codex/unspecified on 2026-04-07
trust	unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content
sources	1 — durkin-2012

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