Week #25 Achieve a High Success Rate

The Power of High Success Rate: Why Getting It Right Matters

In classrooms, on pitches, and  in boardrooms there is a strong sense that real learning is born only in failure. But it also flourishes in success—in carefully designed moments where learners practice just beyond comfort, but can see the success in their efforts.

At The Crafted Concept, we believe in stretching people. But we also believe in doing so with care, clarity, and intentional design. That’s where the principle of high success rate earns its place as one of the most transformative elements in learning.

What Is a High Success Rate?

In his Principles of Instruction, Barak Rosenshine recommended that learners succeed in around 80% of their attempts during guided practice. This sits in the sweet spot of ‘high enough to build confidence and reinforce correct processes, yet low enough to ensure appropriate challenge and cognitive effort’.

Success rate isn’t about ease or spoon-feeding, though, it’s about precision, pitch, and purpose. When learners succeed at something worth learning, it’s not soft. It’s the solid ground from which they can climb.

- Precision means ensuring that what we ask learners to practice is exactly what we want them to master, without overwhelming with extraneous task detail.

- Pitch is about finding that just-right level of difficulty: not so easy that it’s demotivating, not so hard that it overwhelms.

- Purpose reminds us that every task must serve the bigger learning goal—each rep should build towards fluent, transferable knowledge. Together, these ideas steer us towards intentional design, where success is meaningful because it’s earned through well-crafted practice.

Why Does High Success Rate Matter?

It builds motivation and belief.
Success breeds momentum. A student who gets it right is more likely to try again. An athlete who feels progress is more open to repetition. Confidence, crucially, comes after competence, not before it.

It consolidates accurate thinking.
Every correct response strengthens a neural pathway. Repeated success helps automate the right process with associated schema in the long-term memory—whether it’s solving an equation or executing a passing drill under game-pressure. These experiences alter the memory.

It protects against practising errors.
Struggle has its place. But when a learner repeatedly practices something incorrectly, those errors become embedded. High success rate ensures we’re reinforcing the right mental or motor or movement model, not building bad habits.

It makes feedback more meaningful.
When most responses are correct, feedback can zoom in on nuance and refinement. When everything is going wrong, feedback becomes overwhelming. Success unlocks coaching instead of correction.

In Practice: Education and Sport

In the classroom:
A teacher introducing a new writing technique might model it in small steps, then guide students through structured examples. The questions are scaffolded, feedback is live, and success is expected. As accuracy increases, scaffolds are removed and independence rises.

On the training ground:
A football coach working on first-touch control might start with static drills, where the ball arrives slowly and predictably. Once players consistently succeed, the pace increases, then the pressure. The practice design moves from can do to can still do under pressure.

Summary:
High success rate isn’t about lowering the bar. It’s about placing it where learners can reach, stretch, and ascend. It’s the instructor’s responsibility to design that success. Ultimately, learners do not learn from getting it wrong; they learn from getting it right—and knowing why.

Success is not the ceiling. It’s the launchpad.