Teach Effectively!

Many of us who advocate effective instructional practices include frequent assessment of student learning as a critical component of teaching. Witness, for example the emphasis on progress monitoring in most special education practices and its inclusion in sensible response-to-instruction or -intervention models. Indeed, consider the now-somewhat-dated-but-still-unrefuted finding by L. and D. Fuchs (1986) that teachers who use formative assessment have students who score nearly 3/4ths of a standard deviation above the students of teachers who do not use formative assessment.

Yesterday I learned that a study about to be published in Science strengthens my support for assessment. In “The Critical Importance of Retrieval for Learning,” Professors Jeffrey Karpicke and Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke reported that students’ learning of vocabulary improves when they are tested rather than simply required to study.

Learning is often considered complete when a student can produce the correct answer to a question. In our research, students in one condition learned foreign language vocabulary words in the standard paradigm of repeated study-test trials. In three other conditions, once a student had correctly produced the vocabulary item, it was repeatedly studied but dropped from further testing, repeatedly tested but dropped from further study, or dropped from both study and test. Repeated studying after learning had no effect on delayed recall, but repeated testing produced a large positive effect. In addition, students’ predictions of their performance were uncorrelated with actual performance. The results demonstrate the critical role of retrieval practice in consolidating learning and show that even university students seem unaware of this fact.

Previously, Professors Roediger and Karpicke showed that taking a test, not just studying for it, improved students’ outcomes. They allowed students to study a passage from the Test of English as a Foreign Language (ToEFL) and then assessed their performance. Some students were tested for retention of the ideas (study-test; ST), but others were given a second study session (study-study; SS). They then tested students in both groups 5 min, 2 days, or 1 week later. Initially, the study-study (SS) group performed better, but on the later tests the study-test (ST) group had higher scores. In another experiment the extended their findings, showing that students in a study-study-study-study condition initially had slightly higher scores, but that those in study-study-study-test and study-test-test-test conditions out-performed them dramatically on retention assessments. So, reading the content more frequently did not help as much as taking tests repeatedly.

The beneficial effects of brief tests such as these probably are largely irrelevant to the debate about high-stakes tests. In my view, these results show, however, that an alternative approach to assessing performance—smaller, more frequent, incrementally more difficult—assessments might have value as a means of monitoring whether students are making andmight actually help students to make that progress.

• Link to a press release about one of the studies: “Repeated test-taking better for retention than repeated studying, research shows,” by Gerry Everding.
• Link to the public materials from Science about the more recent study.

Fuchs, L. A., & Fuchs, D. (1986). Effects of systematic formative evaluation: A meta-analysis. Exceptional Children, 53, 199-208.

Karpicke, J. D., & Roediger, H. L. (2008). The critical importance of retrieval for learning. Science, 319, 966-968.

Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17, 249-255.