Testing is the second 'Inexpensive Technique to Improve Education'. “A large amount of research in the past 20 years has shown that the act of taking a test does not simply measure what has been learned but solidifies that learning”. The finding is usually demonstrated using variations of the following process: students are taught something; some students are immediately tested while some are not; all students are tested at a later date. What apparently pretty much always happens - this finding has one of the most robust evidence bases of all the strategies I’ve ever read about - is that the students who were tested shortly after learning new material remembered it much better later on. Memory, intuitively, is even better when feedback is given on the initial test. Because when they take a test, students are forced into consciously trying to remember - a process called Retrieval Practice - the simple activity of sitting a test makes them better rememberers by smoothing neural pathways to relevant information. But testing has other benefits as well. It shows students what they know and what they don’t know and so allows them to focus their future study on what they don’t know. Students therefore study material more effectively after they’ve taken a test. Teachers, also, benefit from having their students take regular tests as it makes it easier to plan tailored interventions and/or reteaching of material. Unlike highlighting, for example, tests help students in the process of identifying the most important information. Regular tests throughout a unit of work, hopefully, encourage students and teachers to engage in regular recall and revision during and between lessons. In some ways, by encouraging students to use testing as a revision strategy, or by giving some lesson time over to testing, we are sacrificing short-term gains for long-term benefits. A strategy I have used is to give students some information - usually in knowledge organiser format - and five minutes of study time. I have them sit a five question test immediately (the resourcees from one of these lessons are attached at the bottom of this post) and then again at the end of the lesson. Research suggests that the students would do better in the end-of-lesson test if, instead of immediately being tested, they were given more study time. In a test delivered the following week, however, my strategy will win out. In this way, testing is an example of what Robert Bjork calls ‘desirable difficulty’. The graph below, from a 2006 study by Roediger and Karpicke, illustrates this effect. If you're interested in reading more, try these: The Many Benefits of Retrieval Practice - The Learning Scientists 'Knowledge Organisers' - Joe Kirby (History Teacher) Database of Knowledge Organisers - All Subjects
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