Withhold Answers from Yourself to Help You Learn Better

We’ve heard a lot lately about the benefits of experiencing and overcoming failure.

One way to get these benefits is to set things up so that you’re sure to fail—by tackling a difficult problem without any instruction or assistance. Manu Kapur, a researcher at the Learning Sciences Lab at the National Institute of Education of Singapore, has reported (in the Journal of the Learning Sciences) that people who try solving math problems in this way don’t come up with the right answer—but they do generate a lot of ideas about the nature of the problems and about what potential solutions would look like, leading them to perform better on such problems in the future…

you can implement it in your own learning by allowing yourself to struggle with a problem for a while before seeking help or information.