Studying and Testing on Long-Term Retention

In most educational situations, both teachers and students make a sharp distinction between learning and assessment. Learning occurs when students read their textbooks, listen to lectures, take notes, review their books and notes, and work in collaborative study groups. Students’ learning is assessed from time to time by the requirement to take quizzes, tests, and exams. Little thought is given to the idea that the act of assessment may affect learning, except perhaps in the writing of term papers and the like. Teachers and students think tests are like dipsticks, dropped into the students’ heads every so often to measure what they have learned, but without having any effect on the process of learning itself. The same sharp distinction between studying and testing is embedded in experimental approaches to learning. Psychologists interested in learning started out with the assumption that testing measures but does not affect memory. The classic method to measure learning has been the venerable study/test method (Roediger & Arnold, 2012). Subjects in psychology experiments study a list of elements (nonsense syllables, words, pictures) and then take a test of some sort on that material (such as a free recall test). Then these study/test cycles are repeated. When performance (e.g., number of words recalled) is plotted on the ordinate against trials on the abscissa, the standard learning curve unfolds. A typical one is represented in the standard condition in Figure 6.1. Psychologists have spent 130 years debating how and why learning occurs, since Ebbinghaus (1885/1964) began experimental study of the topic. One assumption is that every time an element (e.g., a word) is presented, its mental representation or its memory trace accrues a bit of strength; over trials, as strength grows, a threshold is reached that permits the subject (or student) to recall the information. This is the incremental assumption of learning, embodied in Clark Hull’s learning theory (e.g., Hull, 1943) and many others. 6 The Relative Benefits of Studying and Testing on Long-Term Retention