Research School Network: Getting the Most Out of Revision by Using the Testing Effect How to make use of the time we have left with students before their final exams

‘Testing is a powerful means of improving learning, not just assessing it.’
Roediger and Karpicke 2006

​‘Retrieval is critical for robust, durable, long-term learning.’
Karpicke 2016

With the critical exam period of the academic year just around the corner, schools and colleges everywhere are trying to eek the most out of every moment in terms of preparation and revision. The juxtaposition of content-heavy specifications with time-poor students and staff can make for a stressful combination. This is why taking one of those moments to consider the benefits and relative ease of regularly testing students as a revision strategy may well pay dividends in the summer.

In their paper ​‘Test-Enhanced Learning: Taking Memory Tests Improves Long-Term Retention’, Roediger and Karpicke begin by stating that testing is undervalued and underused as a strategy for learning, and that it should not just be seen as a method of assessment in itself. To understand why this is the case it is useful to adopt Karpicke’s simple explanation of how memory links to learning in terms of encoding and retrieval: Encoding refers to the making of new memories and retrieval refers to recovery of past memories. Karpicke goes on to explain that, contrary to the popular belief that all learning occurs through encoding, it is in fact retrieval that enables a person to ​‘create coherent and integrated representations of complex concepts’, or in other words schema. Schema are essential for the ​‘kind of deep learning necessary to solve new problems and draw new inferences’. Consequently, in order to enhance students’ learning, and therefore success in examinations, the implication is that we would be wise to spend the precious time we have left asking students to recall what they need to know.

Roediger and Karpicke suggest that the two main benefits of testing are:

1. If students know they will be tested regularly then they are more likely to study more and space out their study (you can read about spaced learning here).

2. Regular testing has a powerful positive effect on future retention. If students are tested on material and successfully recall it then they have a much better chance of recalling it in the future, in a high-stakes exam for example.

The Experiments
Despite the clear potential of utilising the testing effect for students, Roediger and Karpicke explain that it is not well known outside the field of cognitive psychology. Thus, the two researchers set about conducting their own experiments in educationally relevant settings. The experiments evaluated in their paper involved giving undergraduate students prose material to study and then asking them to retrieve the material through free recall, or in other words in an essay-style response rather than multiple-choice questions or short-answer questions. The students received no feedback on their recalled material. This group was compared to a control group who were asked to study the same prose material. However, instead of engaging in free recall after the first exposure, the control group restudied the material with it in front of them. The rationale behind this is that the researchers wanted to investigate if testing is better than just restudying the material. Restudying the whole material, as was done by the control group, should bias the results as students in the test group only re-experienced what they could recall with no feedback whereas the control group had greater exposure to the material.

The Results
Roediger and Karpicke report that immediate testing after reading a prose passage promoted better retention in tests given immediately after but ​‘the effects reversed in delayed tests.’ This outcome occurred even though the students received no feedback. Conversely, restudying 100% of the material produced poor long-term retention (40%) compared to 61% with repeated testing. The principle of repeated testing is important here. As Karpicke explains, massed retrieval or ​‘repeating a new piece of information over and over in your head right after you experience it’ produces no additional gains in learning over time (although there can be short-term effects on immediate performance) whereas repeated spaced testing produces very significant positive effects in the long-term.

Some Reasons Why Repeated Testing is More Effective in the Long Term
1. Testing can allow students to practise the skills, e.g. essay writing, during learning that are required during retrieval later on. Restudying only exposes students to the content again.

2. Testing creates ​‘desirable difficulties’ which you can read about here.

3. Restudying can inflate a student’s confidence; he or she thinks that they know more than they do. This short-term sense of success gives a false notion that he or she will perform well in the long term and thus hinder further effort.

In the Classroom
It is clear that repeated testing can be a hugely beneficial way to spend the time students have left. Yet despite the wealth of evidence in favour of testing, it seems students are often very reluctant to engage with this strategy. The Learning Scientists have explored this issue after experiencing for themselves the difficulty of getting students to self-test. Yana Weinstein suggests that students may not self-test because:

It’s hard
It makes you realise what you don’t know
You don’t know how to do it
You don’t have any practice materials
You don’t realise it could be beneficial.

Whilst there is not much we as teachers can do to change the barriers in this list (and, indeed, we would not want to change the first two as they underpin the success of the whole strategy) teachers are very much able to support students in conquering these challenges and thus feel less fearful of self-testing as a result. Shaun Allison’s blog provides some suggestions on what concrete strategies to use in the classroom and beyond to ensure the testing effect is used to its full potential.