Errorless Learning

Errorless learning is an instructional design, introduced by the psychologist Charles Ferster in the 1950s during his studies of what makes an effective learning environment, in which a task or a teaching sequence is structured so that a learner is very unlikely ever to make a mistake while acquiring a new response, in contrast to teaching methods that let learners make and then correct errors along the way. B. F. Skinner was also influential in developing the technique, and in his 1968 book The Technology of Teaching he argued that errors are not necessary for learning to occur and are not a fault of the learner, but instead reflect a poorly designed shaping program that moves a learner too quickly between steps; a well designed errorless procedure instead breaks a target behavior into small enough steps, with enough support at each one, that the correct response is reliably produced from the start.