An Evaluation of the Testing Effect with Third Grade Students

Previous research shows that being tested after studying a set of material will improve recall of that material on a later test. While this effect has been shown to be robust in adults using both simple material, such as word lists, and complex texts, little research has been done looking at this effect in children. In the current study, third-grade students were asked to read stories while being tested with multiple-choice questions requiring inferences and understanding of the main ideas, with questions requiring knowledge of facts, or with no questions. Afterwards, they were asked to give a summary of the text and answer short open ended questions. Results showed that children did better on the summary and open-ended questions after having answered questions than not. However, there was no difference between inference/main idea questions and fact questions. These results suggest that the testing effect is a robust effect that transcends type of question and age.