TITLE: The Testing Effect
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: June 07, 2007 10:14 AM
DESC: 
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BODY:
In the current issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education,
the article
<A HREF="http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i40/40a01401.htm">
   You Will be Tested on This</A>
(behind pay wall) tells us something researchers have known
for decades but which too few teachers act on:  People learn
better when they are required to actively recall and
use knowledge soon after they learn it.

This idea was first documented by Herbert Spitzer, who did
a study in the late 1930s with Iowa sixth-graders.  Students
who were quizzed about a reading assignment within twenty-four
hours of their first reading the article scored much better
than students who had been quizzed later or not at all.  The
results did not follow from different study habits or from
extra preparation, as "students did not know when they would
be quizzed, and they did not keep the article, so they had
no chance to study on their own.

This has come to be called the Testing Effect.  Spitzer
concluded:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
"Immediate recall in the form of a test is an effective method
of aiding the retention of learning and should, therefore, be
employed more frequently in the elementary school."
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

As the Chronicle piece points out, the Testing Effect runs
counter to conventional wisdom:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
"The testing effect cuts against the lay understanding of
memory," says Jeffrey D. Karpicke, who recently completed a
doctorate at Washington University and will become an assistant
professor of psychology at Purdue University this fall.  "People
usually imagine memory as a storage space, as a space where we
put things, as if they were books in a library.  But the act of
retrieval is not neutral.  It affects the system."
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

This is another case where we rely on a metaphor beyond its
range of applicability.  Knowing where it fails and why can
help us do our job better.  In the case of human memory,
instructors can help students improve their learning simply
by giving a quiz promptly after teaching a new idea.  Giving
feedback promptly is even better, because it allows students
to correct misconceptions before they become too firmly
implanted.

Note that the Testing Effect does not gets its benefit from
getting students to do more or different studying:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
The purpose of this quizzing is not to motivate students to
pay attention and to study more; if those things happen, the
researchers say, they are nice side effects.  The real point
is that quizzing, if done correctly, is a uniquely powerful
method for implanting facts in students' memory.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

The value of prompt quizzing isn't from students studying for
the quiz.  It is from the <STRONG>act of taking the quiz
itself</STRONG>, making an effort to retrieve items from
memory.  As a psychology professor from Washington University
in St. Louis is quoted in the article, "every time you test
someone, you change what they know."

There are a lot of open questions about how the Testing Effect
works and the conditions under which it is maximized, such as
the role of feedback, immediate or otherwise.  One of the major
objections raise by some university professors I know is that
such frequent, short-answer testing favors the memorization
of isolated facts at the expense of broader conceptual learning.
Current research is trying to answer some of these questions.

Many professors also balk at the idea of writing and grading
all these quizzes.  There are technological solutions to part
of this problem.  Many folks use Blackboard to give and grade
simple quizzes.  For writing code, we might try something
like Nick Parlante's
<A HREF="http://javabat.com">
   JavaBat.com</A>
tool.  Because the Testing Effect does not depend on motivating
students to study more, I don't think that grading the quizzes
is all that important.  The key is simply to get the students
to do active recall and retrieval.

My teaching may already benefit from the Testing Effect.  I do
not give quizzes, but I do begin nearly every class session
with an Opening Exercise that asks students to use some ideas
we learned the previous session to solve a problem.  In courses
that teach programming, these exercises almost always involve
writing code.  In an algorithms or compiler course, the exercise
might be a more general problem to solve.  But in all cases the
exercises require students to produce something, not select
true/false or a multiple-choice answer.  After students have
had time to work on the problem, we debrief answers and discuss
possibilities.  This is the sort of immediate feedback that
seems valuable to learners -- and which I have a hard time
providing when I have to grade items.  Later in the period,
I may ask students to solve another exercise as well.  Doing
things always seems like a better idea than listening to me
yammer on for 75 uninterrupted minutes.

I have only once concern that my approach doesn't deliver the
Testing Effect.  Because I don't grade the quiz, I fear that
some students choose not to exert much effort -- and effort is
the key!  I'm not so concerned that I myself am yet motivated
to collect and grade the exercises, but maybe I should be.
One thing that doesn't concern me is memorization of isolated
facts at the expense of broader conceptual learning.  My
exercises ask student use the knowledge, not parrot it back,
and good exercises cause students to integrate new knowledge
into their larger understanding.
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