Trial-And-Error Seems to Boost Learning

From the ASCD daily e-mail newsletter:

Students learn more effectively through trial and error in answering questions about challenging material, according to researchers who found that getting answers wrong actually helps learning. Their research revealed that students perform better if they try to answer questions about a textbook passage before reading it. For example, students should try to answer questions before reading a textbook chapter, then read the chapter and answer them again during and after reading.

Literacy experts among us will think of pre-reading, post-reading, and during-reading strategies and research on grammar and writing when they read this. I find support for how I do my classes, which often have "do it and let's see how you do; then we'll offer commentary and let you go from there" sort of tasks and assessments.