Today’s post comes courtesy of Lorna Tyrtania, ThirdForce Senior Product Manager

I attended Learning Technologies last week. I had the opportunity to attend some great seminars. One speaker referenced a study on test-enhanced learning. Now I’m back in the office I’ve had the chance to locate the paper and have a more detailed read. The paper is entitled “Test Enhanced Learning; Taking Memory tests improves long term retention” written by Henry L. Roediger, III and Jeffrey D. Karpicke from Washington University St Louis in 2006. The paper centres on the “Testing Effect” i.e does giving someone a test on some learned content benefit them? Also does any benefit outweigh the advantages of simply restudying the material?

Results showed that taking a memory test is useful not only for showing what a learner knows but crucially that it enhances later knowledge retention. The main experiment that the authors carried out was based on giving learners a prose passage to study and then giving them 1, 2 or 3 immediate free recall tests with no learner feedback. They contrasted the results of this group with another group who were given the prose passage to restudy the same number of times as the test group took a test. This was to ensure that any effects of the test group simply doing better because the tests offered an opportunity to restudy the prose were controlled.

What the study showed (See Figure 1) was that prior testing produced substantially great knowledge retention than restudying, even though the learners exposed to restudying had reported greater confidence in being able to remember the material.

The authors conclude that “Testing is a powerful means of improving learning, not just assessing it.”

The fact that all of our e-learning contains end of module tests and many modules also contain learner interactivity tests suggests that this method of learning will produce better long term knowledge retention for our learners. Something we’ve always known, but it’s nice to read about an academic studying the effect so successfully!