testing

Older news items (pre-2010) brought over from the old website

The importance of retrieval cues

An imaging study has revealed that it is retrieval cues that trigger activity in the hippocampus, rather than, as often argued, the strength of the memory. The study involved participants learning unrelated word pairs (a process which included making up sentences with the words), then being asked whether various familiar words had been previously seen or not — the words being shown first on their own, and then with their paired cue word. Brain activity for words judged familiar on their own was compared with activity for the same items when shown with context cues. Increased hippocampal activity occurred only with cued recall. Moreover, the amount of activity was not associated with familiarity strength, and recollected items were associated with greater activity relative to highly familiar items.

Making student self-testing an effective study tool

A series of four experiments with 150 college students using Swahili-English vocabulary words has revealed that repeated retrieval was a very effective learning strategy. However, when subjects were given control over their own learning, they did not attempt retrieval as early or as often as they should to promote the best learning. The findings are thought to reflect a powerful metacognitive illusion that occurs during self-regulated learning — namely, that easy retrieval tends to make students believe they have “learned” it before the material is properly mastered, leading to premature termination of the study practice.

Longer high-stakes tests may result in a sense of mental fatigue, but not in lower test scores

A study involving 239 freshman college students who took three different versions of the SAT Reasoning Test, of progressively longer lengths (3.5, 4.5, 5.5 hours), has revealed that although the students reported higher levels of mental fatigue with longer tests, performance was not affected. In fact, the average performance for both the standard and long tests was significantly higher than for the short test. Moreover, the fatigue experienced was less related to the length of the exam (and to the amount of sleep they’d had) than it was to personality traits. Those with higher levels of achievement motivation and competitiveness felt less fatigue, and those with higher levels of neuroticism and anxiety felt more.

Why we don't always learn from our mistakes

A study of the tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) phenomenon suggests that most errors are repeated because the very act of making a mistake, despite receiving correction, constitutes the learning of that mistake. The study asked students to retrieve words after being given a definition. If that produced a TOT state, they were randomly assigned to spend either 10 or 30 seconds trying to retrieve the answer before finally being shown it. When tested two days later, it was found that they tended to TOT on the same words as before, and were especially more likely to do so if they had spent a longer time trying to retrieve them The longer time in the error state appears to reinforce that incorrect pattern of brain activation that caused the error.

Testing strengthens recall whether something's on the test or not

The simple act of taking a test appears to help you remember everything you learned, even if it isn't tested. In a series of three experiments, researchers found undergraduates tested after being given 25 minutes to study a long article about the toucan bird recalled more a day later than those given further information about the toucan in an extra study session, or those who had neither experience. In the second experiment, students were given two articles to read, one of which was tested and one of which was not. Again, the one tested was remembered significantly better a day later. The third experiment revealed that later recall was better the more time the student had spent on answering questions in the first test. This relation was especially pronounced for students with lower performance on the test, and those who were encouraged to guess did significantly better on the second test than students who were discouraged from guessing.

Repeated test-taking better for retention than repeated studying

A study indicates that testing can be a powerful means for improving learning, not just assessing it. The study compared students who studied a prose passage for about five minutes and then took either one or three immediate free-recall tests, receiving no feedback on the accuracy of answers, with students who received no tests, but were allowed another five minutes to restudy the passage each time their counterparts were involved in a testing session. While the study-only group performed better on the test after the last session, they performed worse when tested 2 days later, and dramatically worse after one week. Note that the study-only group had read the passage about 14 times in total, while the repeated testing group had read the passage only 3.4 times in its one-and-only study session. It also appears that students who rely on repeated study alone often come away with a false sense of confidence about their mastery of the material.