The NUS Department of Psychology is proud to announce that Dr. Wong Shi Hui Sarah has won the prestigious 2023 APA Paul R. Pintrich Outstanding Dissertation Award from the American Psychological Association (APA), Division 15 (Educational Psychology), for her Ph.D. thesis titled “From Prevention to Promotion: Learning From Deliberate Errors”.

The Paul R. Pintrich Outstanding Dissertation Award is typically awarded to a single recipient worldwide annually for excellence in educational psychology doctoral dissertation research. Established and named in honour of Paul R. Pintrich, a Fellow and former President of APA Division 15, the Award is open to all areas of educational psychology and any related area of psychological or educational research.

Historically, Dr. Sarah Wong is the first Singaporean to win the Award. She has been invited to deliver an award address at the 2024 APA Annual Convention in Seattle.

The award-winning work was undertaken as part of Dr. Wong’s Ph.D. research at our department under the mentorship of Assoc Prof Stephen Lim, and was guided by the overarching question: How can we strategically and systematically learn from our errors?

In her thesis, Dr. Wong developed a Prevention–Permission–Promotion (3P) framework of approaches to errors in learning, and applied it to review extant cognitive, educational, and applied psychology research. Whereas errors have typically been avoided or, at best, allowed to occur spontaneously, Dr. Wong challenged these views to propose that deliberately committing and correcting errors enhances learning more than avoiding them—a counterintuitive phenomenon that she termed the derring effect. Across multiple studies, Dr. Wong empirically tested and found evidence that deliberate erring improves not only knowledge retention, but also higher order learning outcomes.

Dr. Wong’s research has been published in leading journals such as Educational Psychologist, Educational Psychology Review, Journal of Educational Psychology, and Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. She has also received the international 2020 Association for Psychological Science (APS) Student Research Award and 2021 Wang Gungwu Medal and Prize for Best Ph.D. Thesis in the Social Sciences and Humanities.

In her earlier interview with APS, Dr. Wong shared,

As psychologists, we routinely acquaint with fascinating examples of errors in human cognition that may serve fundamentally adaptive purposes. We are all fallible. Yet, throughout history, we have constantly striven to deny our ordinary, imperfect, and universal humanity. Thus, it is empowering to know that deliberately committing and correcting errors—the very events that we so often seek to avoid—can in fact benefit us. This research can potentially transform the way in which we approach education in practice and policy. By deliberately embracing our errors and wisely placing ourselves in the way of being wrong, we can overcome and rise stronger.”

Congratulations, Dr. Wong!

References

Wong, S. S. H. (2023). Deliberate erring improves far transfer of learning more than errorless elaboration and spotting and correcting others’ errors. Educational Psychology Review, 35(1), Article 16. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-023-09739-z

Wong, S. S. H., & Lim, S. W. H. (2019). Prevention–permission–promotion: A review of approaches to errors in learning. Educational Psychologist, 54(1), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2018.1501693

Wong, S. S. H., & Lim, S. W. H. (2022). Deliberate errors promote meaningful learning. Journal of Educational Psychology, 114(8), 1817–1831. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000720

Wong, S. S. H., & Lim, S. W. H. (2022). The derring effect: Deliberate errors enhance learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 151(1), 25–40. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001072