Learning and Regret

There's a very interesting article in the latest Science where the authors designed an artificial neural net with regret to make it more accurately emulate human learning in an economic setting. This itself raises an interesting issue: the role of regret in learning. We feel immediate regret when we discover that we did something wrong. We reflect back on our choices and look at what we could have done. This allows us to learn more rapidly. (In a much earlier posting, I talk about how letting go of regret is freeing and psychologically healthy -- but in that instance, I was talking about holding on to regret, not the immediate, transitory feeling we get in this instance.) This makes a lot of sense, if you think about it. Suppose you have two students. Both miss the same question on a test. Student A looks at the test and shrugs his shoulder and goes "oh well." Student B looks at the test and regrets making a wrong answer, causing him to look at the question and his answer and to check what the right answer is. Do I really have to ask you which one of these students is learning? This suggests that we need to foster feelings of regret (in the immediate sense) in students if we want them to learn. Of course, we only regret if we care -- which perhaps only brings us back to the issue of how to make students care about learning in general -- including things they may not really be interested in learning. All of this nonsense about making learning "fun" is just that -- nonsense. The more fun we have made education in this country, the less our students seem to learn. So how do we get students to regret, in this healthy sense of the term?