“There are few surer ways to raise the hackles of many students and educators than talking about testing.” (Make It Stick, 2014).
Testing has a negative connotation for both students and teachers, mainly due to the high emphasis on summative, high-stakes exams that can be stressful for students and time-consuming for teachers to implement and manage. Most reachers view tests as necessary evils. Students often develop unhealthy learning habits, like the pump and dump strategy where they cram for one exam, then try to lose as fast as possible to cram for the next one.
The issue is that testing is typically viewed as a vehicle for assessment, not a vehicle of learning. This creates a risk averse environment where there is no room to fail.
Let’s pause for a minute…
Testing is a measure of learning right, but testing is not only a measurement.
Research demonstrates that testing is also a powerful learning tool. It is a powerful learning tool when used for formative purposes. Formative testing gives the opportunity for teachers to improve their teaching and for students to improve their learning.
Teachers should change their assessment strategies to replace high-stakes exams with multiple low-stakes or no-stakes tests to build the body of knowledge in a risk-free environment that is a better vehicle for long-term and deep learning.
Researchers often replace the terminology of formative, low-stakes testing by the term “retrieval practice” as it removes the negative connotation associated with testing and orientates the approach toward learning.
Testing oneself on an idea or concept to help remember is called the “testing effect” or “retrieval practice”. This is not new but the testing effect has been mostly overlooked in recent years.
Students and teachers tend to think of memory as a box to be packed with information.
Researchers tell a different story.
“We tend to think of our memories as working much like an audio/video recorder, so if we read or take notes, the information will eventually write itself in our memories. Nothing, however, could be further away from the way we actually learn and remember.” —Elizabeth & Robert Bjork, Professors of Psychology at UCLA.
Research shows that the process of retrieving information from one’s brain actually helps it to be consolidated. It’s more effective to ask students to pull concepts out of their brains than continually trying to put concepts in.
Retention
We should input less and output more.”—Robert Bjork.
Learning is not just pouring information in our head. It is important for effective learning to get information out of our head.
“When we think about learning, we typically focus on getting information into our students’ heads. What if instead we focus on getting information out of our students’ heads?”—Pooja Agarwal.
Testing or the act of retrieving information out of our brain strengthens our memory and facilitates the application of knowledge to new situations. Retrieving what we’ve learned causes our brain to reconsolidate the memory and strengthen its connections to what we already know and make it easier to recall in the future and apply to new contexts.
Think of retrieval as a learning strategy, not an assessment tool.
Low-stakes or no-stakes is key to optimize learning. Students should test themselves all the time, teachers should test students all the time.
Retrieval practice can take different forms, might be questions in the classroom, assignments out of the classroom, self-quizzing etc.
Most of us study wrong. Rereading is by far the most common study strategy for students in higher education. A survey of university students found that 83.6 percent of students choose rereading as a study strategy. That’s probably because rereading feels good. Once you’ve read a chapter a couple of times, you feel like you’ve nailed it, and in the short term you do. However, it turns out that rereading is almost totally ineffective for long-term remembering, even remembering that has to happen just a day later.
Students are often misled as to whether they are learning effectively and have or have not achieved the required level of learning and comprehension.
Cramming pays off, it works in the short term, it can increase performance but we want learning to continue in the long term. This is the debate of performance versus learning. Performance is what we can observe and measure during instruction or training. Learning, that is the permanent change in knowledge or understanding that is the target of instruction, is something we must try to infer, and current performance can be a highly unreliable index of whether learning has occured.
The methods we too often use only lead to short-term learning. When information comes to mind easily and feels “fluent”, we think we’ve learned successfully. However, memory researchers have demonstrated that the opposite is true: when information comes to mind easily and feels fluent, it’s easy to forget. In other words, just because we learn something quickly and easily does not guarantee we’ll remember it. (Pooja K. Agarwal, How to use retrieval practice to improve learning).
Retrieval practice makes learning effortful and challenging. It requires a mental effort. We might feel like progress is slow but that’s when our best learning takes place.
The more difficult the retrieval practice, the better it is for long-term learning. For instance, recalling an answer to a science question improves learning to a greater extent than looking up the answer in a textbook.
“Desirable difficulties”
The act of retrieving information from the vastness of our memory systems poses a challenge to the brain, which is good. Most people want learning to be easy and effortless, most students want a magic bullet, but learning is not easy and effortless, it takes time.
Testing requires an effort, it is challenging, we might struggle with an answer. It’s this struggle or challenge that improves our memory and learning. It’s this struggle or challenge that makes the subsequent study more effective. The payoff will happen.
Just like exercice, learning works the same way: no pain, no gain.
This is what Robert Bjork calls ‘Desirable difficulties’, making things hard on yourself but in a good way. ‘ Difficulties’ in that they pose challenges (increased frequency of errors) but they are ‘desirable’ in that they foster the very goals of instruction: long-term retention and transfer of knowledge into new situations.
People talk about trying to avoid students making errors but errors are a key component of learning. When you try to answer a question and you make an error, the subsequent studying is more effective. Getting things wrong is not comfortable but we need to start perceiving failure as a friend of learning. Getting the answer wrong when taking questions is important, as long as we are filling that learning gap with subsequent study.
Giving students pretests on which they make a lot of errors as they’ve not studied the material yet, helps make the study phase more efficient. We tend to think that we should ask questions after students study something but pretesting fosters more effective learning.
“Errors are a key component of effective learning.”- Robert Bjork.
Taking a test doesn’t just measure how much you know, it helps reinforce the learning. Research shows that pre‐testing causes students to learn more, mainly because their learning has been primed and retention and retrieval become easier. When students take a test and then restudy the material, they learn more than they would if they restudied without taking a test. This outcome is called test-potentiated learning (Izawa, 1966).
“Tests can potentiate the effectiveness of subsequent study opportunities even under conditions that insure learners will be incorrect on the test.” (Kornell, Hays, & Bjork, 2009).
Conditions that create challenges and slow the rate of apparent learning often optimize long-term retention and transfer. Conditions of learning that make performance improve rapidly often fail to support long-term retention and transfer.
This requires going against one’s intuitions, deviating from standard instructional practices.
Retrieval practice is not only good for memorization, it also improves students’ complex thinking and application of skills, organization of knowledge and transfer of knowledge to new concepts. It helps students better apply their knowledge to new situations, new questions and related contexts.
Transfer of knowledge
New situations. One criticism of retrieval practice or testing is that students may be learning facts in a rote, verbatim way. Recent research shows that the benefits of taking a test are not limited to the specific questions or facts that were tested; retrieval practice also improves transfer of knowledge to new contexts. Transfer may be defined as applying knowledge learned in one situation to a new situation. (Roediger, 2011).
New questions and related contexts. Research on testing suggests that retrieval practice does not simply enhance retention of the individual items retrieved during the initial test: taking a test can also produce retrieval-enhanced facilitation, a phenomenon that shows testing also improves retention of nontested but related material. (Roediger et al, 2011).
Feedback
Testing has another benefit. Testing provides feedback.
Testing enables students to identify gaps in knowledge and serves as a guide for future studying. It tells students what they know and don’t know, whether the information has or has not been understood, and therefore where to focus their study efforts to improve weak areas. Students take a practice quiz, realize which questions or items they got wrong, and then spend more time studying the items they missed. Research shows that students are then able to correct their errors on a second test if they did a study session after the first test.
This is critical. We are often misled by an illusion of knowing and testing helps students identify gaps in their learning. Some students study hard for their tests and don’t do well, usually because they studied what they already knew – they didn’t study what they didn’t know.
One reason students reread materials rather than testing themselves is that rereading leads to increased feelings of fluency of the material, it seems so familiar as they reread it they assume they must know it. (Karpicke et al, 2009).
The better students are at differentiating what they know and don’t know, the better they will be at acquiring new and more difficult material and studying efficiently (Thomas & McDaniel, 2007). Students’ ability to accurately predict what they know and do not know is an important skill in education, but unfortunately students often make inacurrate predictions (Roediger, 2011). When students reread material repeatedly, they are often over confident in how well they know the material. This is where testing is very helpful.
Testing also provides feedback to teachers. Teachers can use testing to make sense of what their students have remembered, understood and how they are able to transfer their knowledge to new contexts. Teachers can fail to realize the state of knowledge of their students and pitch their presentations at too high a level. The general idea is that once we know something and understand it well, it is hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. (Roediger, et al. 2011). Tests provide teachers with valuable information on students’ knowledge and guidance about where to go next with their students. It might be assessment on the fly, quizzing students’ understanding during lectures with the use of clicker systems, or a more formal approach with formative assessment outside the classroom to help better understand what students know.
One last benefit. Regular testing also motivates students to study more evenly and not wait for the midterm or end of year exam to study the material just before the tests. It alleviates students’ typical concerns and stress on testing.
References:
Articles
Bjork, R. A., & Bjork, E. L. (2011). Making Things Hard on Yourself, But in a Good Way: Creating Desirable Difficulties.
Roediger, H. L., Putnam A.L., & Smith M.A. (2011). Ten Benefits of Testing and Their Applications to Educational Practice, Psychology of learning and motivation, 55, 1-36.
Izawa C. (1966). Reinforcement-Test Sequences in Paired-Associate Learning, Chizuko Izawa. Psychological Reports, 18, 879-919.
Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006b). The power of testing memory: Basic research and implications for educational practice. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1, 181–210.
Butler, A. C. (2010). Repeated testing produces superior transfer of learning relative to repeated studying. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,Memory, and Cognition, 36, 1118–1133.
Books
Brown, P.C., Roediger, H.L. and McDaniel, M.A. (2014) Make it stick. The Science of Successful Learning. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Podcasts/websites
How to use retrieval practice to improve learning, by Pooja K. Agarwal, Henry L. Roadiger III, Mark A. MaDaniel, Kathleen B. McDermott
Henry Roediger – Retrieval Practice to Enhance Learning and Retention
Gocognitive YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtmMMR7SJKw.
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