Research School Network: Rethinking Testing Testing has a bit of a bad name in education. This is a shame as evidence suggests that testing actually supports learning.

Testing has a bit of a bad name in education. The high stakes, standardised tests that are often used in schools, often fill students with dread and fear as they don’t want to be judged in terms of their ability. Similarly, teachers will often associate them with being judged in terms of their performance in the classroom. This is great shame, as there is a growing body of research evidence that low-stakes testing actually supports learning, as it is supporting retrieval practice. Retrieval practice – the act of having to retrieve something from your memory (often with the help of a cue) – is critical for robust, durable, long-term learning. Every time a memory is retrieved, that memory becomes more accessible in the future. Retrieval also helps us create coherent and integrated mental representations of complex concepts, the kind of deep learning necessary to solve new problems and draw new inferences.


Roediger and Karpicke (2006) looked at this is in ​‘Test Enhanced Learning: Taking memory tests improves long term retention’. In this study, students studied prose passages and then either took 2 or 3 tests to help them remember the content or simply restudied the prose 2 or 3 times. Both groups of students were then tested on the passages 5 minutes, 2 days or 1 week later. When the test was 5 minutes afterwards, those students who studied the passage multiple times, performed better in terms of recall. However, when they were tested 2 days or 1 week later, those students who studied the passages but then did multiple tests on it, performed much better in terms of recall than those students who studied it multiple times. The conclusion from this? Testing is a powerful means of improving learning, not just assessing it.


So what are the implications of this for the classroom? We need to be encouraging self-testing with students i.e. providing opportunities for students to retrieve things from their memory. There are a number of low-effort, high-impact ways in which we can do this:


Questioning – the most obvious way of doing this is to ask students questions about their previous learning – not just last lesson, but last week and last month. The trick here though is not to allow them to look back in their book!

Retrieval quizzes at the start of the lesson – similarly to asking them questions, as students enter your classroom have a quick quiz on the board for them to do (again, without using their books and again, from last lesson, last week and last month).

Write everything you know about…. – provide students with a visual stimulus e.g. a photo of an animal cell and ask them to recall and write down everything they know about it.

Cornell note taking– during the lesson, students write key questions or key words in the margin of their work, based on the key ideas from the lesson. When it comes to revising, rather than just reading their notes, they should test themselves on these questions. More here.

Blind mind mapping – give students a blank copy of a mind map (that you have looked at with them before) and ask them to add the content from memory.

Flashcards– a really effective way of encouraging students to self-test key tier 2 and 3 vocabulary. More here.

Knowledge Organisers – these are another great way of encouraging students to self-test on key tier 2 and 3 vocabulary – cover up the definitions of words and try to remember them. Alternatively, they can be used to ​‘pair-quiz’ – where one student has the knowledge organiser and quizzes the other.

Homework– this is often a missed opportunity for retrieval practice. Rather than just setting Y11 questions on what they have been studying that month, why not include some questions on what they did in Y10?

Complete the sequence – students can be given a partially completed flow diagram or time line and be asked to add in the gaps from memory.

These are just a few ways to support self-testing in lessons – there will be many more. By encouraging students to try to remember things, we are making that memory even stronger. In the words of Daniel Willingham:


​“Memory is the residue of thought”