How tests make us smarter
Students in classes with a regimen of regular low- or
no-stakes testing carry their learning forward through the term,
like compounded interest. ST FILE PHOTO
By HENRY L.ROEDIGER III
TESTS have a bad reputation
in education circles these days: They take time, the critics say,
put students under pressure and, in the case of standardized
testing, crowd out other educational priorities. But the truth is
that, used properly, testing as part of an educational routine
provides an important tool not just to measure learning, but to
promote it.
In one study I published with Jeffrey Karpicke, a
psychologist at Purdue, we assessed how well students remembered
material they had read. After an initial reading, students were
tested on some passages by being given a blank sheet of paper and
asked to recall as much as possible. They recalled about 70 percent
of the ideas.
Other passages were not tested but were re-read,
and thus 100 per cent of the ideas were re-exposed. In final tests
given either two days or a week later, the passages that had been
tested just after reading were remembered much better than those
that had been re-read.
What’s at work here? When students are tested, they
are required to retrieve knowledge from memory. Much educational
activity, such as lectures and textbook readings, is aimed at
helping students acquire and store knowledge. Various kinds of
testing, though, when used appropriately, encourage students to
practice the valuable skill of retrieving and using knowledge. The
fact of improved retention after a quiz — called the testing effect
or the retrieval practice effect — makes the learning stronger and
embeds it more securely in memory.
This is vital, because many studies reveal that
much of what we learn is quickly forgotten. Thus a central
challenge to learning is finding a way to stem forgetting.
The question is how to structure and use tests
effectively. One insight that we and other researchers have
uncovered is that tests serve students best when they’re integrated
into the regular business of learning and the stakes are not
make-or-break, as in standardized testing. That means, among other
things, testing new learning within the context of regular classes
and study routines.
Students in classes with a regimen of regular low-
or no-stakes quizzing carry their learning forward through the
term, like compounded interest, and they come to embrace the
regimen, even if they are skeptical at first. A little studying
suffices at exam time — no cramming required.
Moreover, retrieving knowledge from memory is more
beneficial when practice sessions are spaced out so that some
forgetting occurs before you try to retrieve again. The added
effort required to recall the information makes learning stronger.
It also helps when retrieval practice is mixed up — whether you’re
practicing hitting different kinds of baseball pitches or solving
different solid geometry problems in a random sequence, you are
better able later to discriminate what kind of pitch or geometry
problem you’re facing and find the correct solution.
Surprisingly, researchers have also found that the
most common study strategies — like underlining, highlighting and
re-reading — create illusions of mastery but are largely wasted
effort, because they do not involve practice in accessing or
applying what the students know.
When my colleagues and I took our research out of
the laboratory and into a middle school class, we found that
students earned an average grade of A- on material that had been
presented in class once and subsequently quizzed three times,
compared with a C+ on material that had been presented in the same
way and reviewed three times but not quizzed. The benefit of
quizzing remained in a follow-up test eight months later.
Notably, Mary Pat Wenderoth, a biology professor at
the University of Washington, has found that this benefit holds for
women and underrepresented minorities, two groups that sometimes
experience a high washout rate in fields like the sciences.
This isn’t just a matter of teaching students to be
better test takers. As learners encounter increasingly complex
ideas, a regimen of retrieval practice helps them to form more
sophisticated mental structures that can be applied later in
different circumstances. Think of the jet pilot in the flight
simulator, training to handle midair emergencies. Just as it is
with the multiplication tables, so it is with complex concepts and
skills: effortful, varied practice builds mastery.
We need to change the way we think about testing.
It shouldn’t be a white-knuckle finale to a semester’s work, but
the means by which students progress from the start of a semester
to its finish, locking in learning along the way and redirecting
their effort to areas of weakness where more work is needed to
achieve proficiency.
Standardized testing is, in some respects a quest
for more rigor in public education. But We can achieve rigor in a
different way. We can instruct teachers on the use of low-stakes
quizzing in class. We can teach students the benefits of retrieval
practice and how to use it in their studying outside class. These
steps cost little and cultivate habits of successful learning that
will serve students throughout their lives.
NEW YORK TIMES
The writer is a professor of
psychology at Washington University in St Louis and a co-author of
Make It Stick: The Science Of Successful Learning.
Opinion, The Straits Times, Wednesday, July 23, 2014, Pg A23