Putting the cart before the horse: testing to improve learning.

source of tension and debate among educators is the role that tests should play in education. On the one hand, some argue that there is a clear need for reliable and valid assessment. Others, however, worry about negative consequences of tests, such as " cramming. " Although the cost:benefit ratio is highly dependent on the context in which testing is used, recent literature is burgeoning with suggestions that there may be pedagogical benefits to testing that have been underappreciated and understudied. Testing yields better long term retention than repeated studying Investigating what has been called the " testing effect, " Roediger and Karpicke report on a pair of experiments in which students were asked to study a series of prose passages. In one study, half of the participants were asked to study the material a second time (the " study " group), whereas the other half were asked to write down as much of the material as they could remember (the " free recall test " group). Those in the latter group showed greater long term retention of the material than those who studied the material a second time. In the second study it was found that the more tests that were given, the more pronounced this difference was. These patterns arose despite the findings that those in the " study " group read the material four times as often as those in the " test " group, and those in the " study " group felt more confident that they had learnt the material. The format of the test matters too Another study has explored this phenomenon in the classroom setting: for each textbook chapter over a term, students were either provided with quizzes (short answer or multiple choice format) or with a series of statements describing critical facts from the chapter. Some material from the text was omitted in both formats. At the end of the course, it was found that students remembered material on which they had been quizzed better than either material studied a second time or material omitted in each format. The short answer quiz format yielded greater retention than did the multiple choice format. Quiz performance need not be monitored to enhance learning The term " self assessment " was first used in the 1960s to describe the use of quizzes for self administered assessment, rather than the reflective and introspective processes commonly associated …