Testing the testing effect in the classroom

Abstract

Laboratory studies show that taking a test on studied material promotes subsequent learning and retention of that material on a final test (termed the testing effect). Educational research has virtually ignored testing as a technique to improve classroom learning. We investigated the testing effect in a college course. Students took weekly quizzes followed by multiple choice criterial tests (unit tests and a cumulative final). Weekly quizzes included multiple choice or short answer questions, after which feedback was provided. As an exposure control, in some weeks students were presented target material for additional reading. Quizzing, but not additional reading, improved performance on the criterial tests relative to material not targeted by quizzes. Further, short answer quizzes produced more robust benefits than multiple choice quizzes. This pattern converges with laboratory findings showing that recall tests are more beneficial than recognition tests for subsequent memory performance. We conclude that in the classroom testing can be used to promote learning, not just to evaluate learning.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by Institute of Educational Sciences Grant R305H030339. Mary Derbish's participation was supported by a Collaborative Activity Grant from the James S. McDonnell Foundation. This experiment was presented in part at the 46th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Toronto, Canada, November 2005 and at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, California, April 2006. We thank Roddy Roediger and Chuck Weaver for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper and Austin McDaniel, Jesse McDaniel, and Rebecca Roediger for assistance with aspects of the data scoring.

Notes

¹Our prediction is based on the observation that the multiple choice questions used herein were worded very similarly or in many cases identically (as for the example quiz item in the Appendix) to the factual statements presented in the textbook. Thus, though multiple choice testing on course content is not necessarily identical to laboratory recognition tests, for the present materials we assume that recognition of the target fact would underlie, at least somewhat, performance on the multiple choice tests.

²Actual course examinations could not be used in the experiment because the Institutional Review Board would not allow the experiment to be conducted as a required part of the course. Consequently, using the material tested in the course as target material for the experiment was judged as possibly coercive and therefore inappropriate.

³The mnemonic benefits of retrieving an answer for a short answer quiz question may appear related to the mnemonic benefits of generating a target item during study (i.e., the generation effect, Jacoby, 1978; Slamecka & Graf, 1978). In considering this issue, Carrier and Pashler (1992) suggested, however, that the two effects emerge for different reasons.