The effect of practice test modality on perceived mental effort and delayed final test performance

ABSTRACT

Taking a test on studied materials results in better delayed recall performance than restudying (a.k.a. the testing effect). A common finding in testing effect research is that the effect depends on test format: the magnitude of the testing effect differs between free-recall, cued-recall, and recognition testing. This is explained by the effortful retrieval hypothesis: effortful successful retrieval results in better memory for an item than less effortful successful retrieval. However, the assumption that successful retrieval on different types of tests requires different levels of effort has not yet been tested. To test this assumption, we measured perceived mental effort on different test formats. Participants indicated free-recall was more effortful than cued-recall, and cued-recall more effortful than recognition. Furthermore, cued and free-recall yielded better cued-recall performance on a one-week delayed test than restudy or recognition. The results support the assumption that different practice test formats require different levels of mental effort.

KEYWORDS:

• mental effort
• test format
• effortful retrieval
• retrieval practice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Michelle Janssen for her assistance with collecting the data.

Notes

1 The non-normal (skewed) distribution of mental effort scores may have been caused by the setup of the experiment. Because the retention interval was longer, the current experiment included more repetitions than the experiment of Carpenter (2009), in which these word pairs were previously used. It is possible that the materials were (perceived as) easy to learn in the current experiment because of the additional exposure in the learning phase, which caused the skewed distribution of scores.