Assessment presents a perennial challenge for both faculty and their students. To excel on a test, students must engage in a series of complex cognitive tasks they rarely practice. To effectively measure student learning, faculty must design summative assessments to target specific knowledge and skill. Unfortunately, despite knowing and understanding the subject matter at a deep level, assessment design and test taking can go often awry for instructors and their students. It is curious that while assessment is one of the most dominant features of education at all levels, learners and their professors seldom receive direct instruction or training on research-based strategies that are proven to radically improve classroom testing. A consequence of the lack of adoption of research-based strategies for test taking and design is a misalignment between student learning and testing that has implications for the integrity of the educational process in our classrooms. The purpose of this essay is to address the misalignment between summative testing and learning and to offer recommendations for better teaching, learning, and testing. While we address classroom summative assessment only, the strategies we recommend are applicable across a variety of testing contexts, including high-stakes, standardized testing. In Part I, we analyze how testing and learning work, and offer retrieval-enhanced learning theory as a bridge to the gap in misalignment between learning and testing. In Part II, we offer four practical recommendations for introducing retrieval-enhanced learning in classroom teaching. We conclude with implications for practice when student learning and testing are aligned. In his book, Why Don't Students Like School, cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham (2010) illustrates a simple model for how learning works. The learning environment is the place where learning occurs, including the physical space that surrounds the learner, all the “information” (content knowledge, data, skill, concepts, facts, procedures, or other things to be learned) present, and the array of activities transpiring within that learning space. To learn any information, it must first enter the students’ learning environment. Information may surface within students’ learning environments in many ways, for example, through solo reading, slides or presentations, listening to a lecture, group discussion, team projects, formative assessment, watching a video, and even through a test. Faculty play the lead role in directing the students’ learning environment through the design of their syllabus, during face-to-face or virtual class meetings, through their build of learning management systems, the activities they use to engage students, questions they pose, and the design of their tests. All of these instructional choices direct students’ attention to particular information within their learning environment. Learning involves interactions among the learning environment and two types of human memory: working or short-term memory and long-term memory. When a student pays attention to information within their learning environment, it enters their working memory first. The working memory is the site of active, conscious awareness in the brain (Willingham, 2010). A defining characteristic of the working memory important to learning is its very limited capacity to hold information. The limitations of the working memory constrain the amount and complexity of the information that the brain can move from the learning environment to the working memory. The amount that humans can hold in their working memory is related to their cognitive load, or the amount of cognitive resources needed for a learner to engage in a cognitive task (Goldstein, 2011). A task that has a high cognitive load will take most of a student's cognitive resources to complete, whereas a task with a low cognitive load will leave some resources available for other activities. Testing is a high-cognitive-load task. If a student experiences test anxiety, the stress will also consume resources from their working memory, leaving fewer resources available for answering test items. The human brain uses selective attention to adjust to cognitive load issues. This distinct kind of attention allows the brain to bring specific information into the working memory, rather than every observable detail within the learning environment (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000; Goldstein, 2011). In order for a student to learn information, they must first pay attention to that specific information (and not other information) in the learning environment. Most of the information that enters a student's learning environment will be lost or forgotten (Willingham, 2010). However, when a student focuses on specific information within their learning environment, that information has a better chance of being retained and accessible in the long-term. Students will lose some of the information to which they pay selective attention, however, some of that information will also make it to the site of the vast storehouse of our long-term memory. In an admittedly simplified description, initial learning occurs when we move information from our working memory to our long-term memory, more formally known as encoding (Karpicke, 2016). Cognitive science research has also firmly established that learning is considerably strengthened through the act of retrieval, or pulling out stored information from our long-term memory back into our working memories (Karpicke, 2016). Selective attention is critical to learning, since it initiates the process of moving information from the learning environment into the working memory and encoding it in the long-term memory. Retrieval is equally, if not more, critical, as it can triple students’ abilities to retain content knowledge and access it during future learning (Roediger & Butler, 2011). As educators, we focus a tremendous amount of time and attention on the process of initial learning. When students do not have prior knowledge, or their prior knowledge is incorrect, initial learning requires students to move information from the learning environment into their working memory and ultimately encode it within their long-term memory. And we generally reserve the reverse, retrieval, for testing situations. Students do the same thing: Most students rely heavily on rehearsal, or repetition of information, to help them get information into their long-term memory and to retain it for use during testing (Karpicke, Butler, & Roediger, 2009). Students who engage in memorization often use rehearsal activities whereby they repeat information over and over again. Memorization can aide initial learning and familiarity with concepts. However, research demonstrates that repeated study, or repeated review of material without a retrieval event, is not as beneficial for long-term retention of content as study that includes retrieval events (Roediger & Butler, 2011). Retrieval also facilitates students’ abilities to make inferences and transfer their learning to new contexts (Butler, 2010; Roediger & Butler, 2011). We contend that students and faculty should increase awareness of retrieval as a powerful learning strategy for use during self-directed study and classroom learning. This is because retrieval is a crucial cognitive process involved in testing, yet too infrequently practiced during study or classroom learning. If you walked into an archetypal classroom where a summative test was being delivered, a set of common features would be present: A silent room, closed-text and no access to notes, no cell-phone use, independent rather than collaborative work, some element of monitoring from an authority figure, and a set of assessment items students must answer in a constrained amount of time. Assessment items come in various forms, including the following: 1) verbatim items where students are required to answer a question using answer choices they have seen before; 2) isomorphic items that test the concepts, knowledge, or skills students have been exposed to, but in a new format or version than the student may have never seen before; and 3) inference items, where students have to make one or more inferences in order to successfully answer questions they may or may not have seen before. To answer any one of these item types correctly, the student has to complete a series of complex steps as outlined in Table 1. A student who does not answer a test item correctly may miss-respond to the item for reasons that have nothing to do with the depth of their knowledge or understanding of the material. We contend that a primary reason for failures that are not a result of gaps in content knowledge is related to the reality that students rarely practice the cognitive skills required for successful test taking. Despite playing a prominent role in the testing process, retrieval is one of the least frequent strategies students engage in during self-directed study (Karpicke et al., 2009). Retrieval is not a common activity during classroom teaching or out-of-class study. The lack of adoption of retrieval among students and faculty is, in part, due to the mechanisms by which students learn to learn. For example, students are rarely provided with any direct instruction on research-based learning strategies (Karpicke, 2009). As such, they develop their own approaches to studying based on what they observe in their families or among their peers. Moreover, since faculty are rarely provided any formal instruction on the science of teaching and learning, they tend to encourage students based on the strategies they used to succeed. What results is an idiosyncratic approach to studying based on observable strategies, rather than cognitive science (see Karpicke, 2009). Students most often study by reading and re-rereading, doing practice problems with their notes in front of them, or rewriting their notes. These rehearsal strategies are essential for the initial learning task of moving information from the environment to the working memory and then the long-term memory. However, rehearsal is far removed from the cognitive tasks students need to engage in during summative testing. Students are not tested on their ability to encode verbatim information into their memories, their listening ability, their adeptness at repeating information over and over again, or their skill at highlighting and reading their notes. Yet, this is how they spend the majority of their time learning. Students are tested on their abilities to analyze, evaluate, understand, retrieve, and work with that information in a timed, monitored, distraction-free environment. Further, most test items in college education do not ask for verbatim responses but require students to engage in the higher order thinking tasks of interpretation or making inferences. Yet, most students study for tests by answering the same questions, doing the same practice problems, and reading the same things repeatedly without any variability in their strategies. In order for students to succeed on tests and for instructors to be certain they are measuring students’ knowledge or skill, students need to practice studying and learning in an environment that is aligned with their testing environment and most importantly, using the same cognitive activities that they will draw on during a test. If an instructor's test is meant to assess students’ abilities to read and reread the text or re-write their notes, or to do practice problems with the book open and their friends around, then learners who use these methods to study are using aligned testing and learning strategies. However, if the instructor requires the students to engage in the steps outlined in Table 1 during a test, students will learn and perform dramatically better on their tests and during future learning if they increase their self-directed learning by engaging in retrieval practice. In the following section, we provide a brief overview of retrieval-enhanced learning theory and then recommend how to apply it to improve teaching and learning. The science of learning has firmly established that the act of retrieving information from long-term memory, instead of reading or reviewing it, significantly enhances memory and learning (Bransford et al., 2000; Brown, III, & McDaniel, 2014; Karpicke, 2012, 2016; Karpicke et al., 2009; Roediger & Butler, 2011; Roediger, Agarwal, McDaniel, & McDermott, 2011). The theory can be applied in a number of ways during classroom time or during self-directed study. Retrieval can be practiced in innumerable ways and simply requires that students actively pull information from their long-term memory into their working memory. The literature on retrieval practice demonstrates that repeated retrieval practice (retrieving information more than once) can improve retention of information and its accessibility during future learning by up to three times when compared to rehearsal or repeated study (Brown et al., 2014; Butler, 2010; Roediger & Butler, 2011). Students who engage in retrieval practice outperform students who engage in rehearsal on lower-level cognitive tasks, such as remembering and higher-level cognitive tasks that require inferential thinking and the transfer of learning to new or unfamiliar contexts (Butler, 2010; Karpicke & Roediger, 2008). Consider two students who are learning about the role of fiber in the maintenance of gut health. Student A studies for five hours. She reads assigned chapters in her text book three times, reviews her notes for class, and repeats facts that she cannot remember over and over again. She goes over her notes with a highlighter to make sure key items stand out. Student B also studies for 5 hours. She reads assigned chapters only once, then closes her book and writes down everything she can remember about what she read. She goes back and checks what she missed and does the exercises again. Student B then reviews her notes from class, but then creates a quiz for herself on the key concepts. She makes up questions about the concepts that are not in the text or notes. She takes the self-test without access to her materials and times herself. She does three cycles of these activities. On the exam, a question Student A and Student B have never seen before shows up: “One of your parents receives news that there is inflammation in their lung. In order to control that inflammation, their doctor recommends a plant-based diet for six weeks. Explain the reasoning behind this dietary recommendation.” Despite spending the same amount of time and effort studying, Student B is far more likely to respond effectively to an inferential question and to remember the details required to answer the question successfully. Since retrieval is such a fundamental activity to testing (see Table 1) and is so firmly established as a powerful learning strategy, we argue that infusing retrieval into instructional practice is a high-impact method to bridge the misalignment between learning and testing. The book Make It Stick (Brown et al., 2014; book review Schmidt, 2015) provides a terrific overview of retrieval. The Critical Role of Retrieval in Long-Term Retention offers a digestible literature review of key research on the topic (Roediger & Butler, 2011). What faculty choose to include in their syllabi and what they choose to assess on tests directs students’ attention to the most important information for learning and even what learning should potentially be of highest value. The act of determining what is included in a course and what is taught in the limited time with students necessarily narrows the scope of content (English, 2000). Faculty can begin to align testing and learning and increase the integrity of the educational process in their classrooms by drawing on retrieval-enhanced theory. First and foremost, we recommend that faculty provide direct instruction to students regarding the steps required for successful testing as outlined in Table 1. The first author includes a description of these steps in the narrative portion of her syllabus; she also includes the ability to use retrieval practice effectively as a key learning outcome (Figure 1). We recommend spending class time explaining retrieval practice to students and specifying that tests require retrieval, not rehearsal, in a very distinct context (quiet, no-distractions, no resources, with new questions they may not have seen before, and so on). Despite it being obvious to faculty, students should be educated on how deeply misaligned their study sessions are compared to what the testing environment is like. Students should be informed that they would be well-served to self-direct their learning with retrieval practice sessions that will help them warm up their cognitive process for tests just as they would for warm up their arm to pitch in a high-stakes baseball game or their voice before an important performance. There are a variety of pedagogical decisions that faculty can make that promote the practice of retrieval-enhanced learning. In this section, we describe broadening pedagogical content knowledge to include retrieval and describe four powerful evidence-based methods faculty can implement in their classrooms. Drawing heavily on the work of John Dewey (1902), Shulman (1987) proposed that teachers have a specialized type of knowledge that transcends the subject-matter knowledge of the scholar and the pedagogical knowledge of how to teach. Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) represents the intersection of content knowledge and the methods faculty use to teach content knowledge through representation, organization, and adaptation to the needs of the learners (Shulman, 1987). Shulman described educators’ development of PCK as occurring through acts of teaching, whereby they gain deeper understanding of the content itself, as well as knowledge about students and how they learn the requisite content. Through the adoption of retrieval-enhanced learning theory, teachers can expand their PCK to include not just how students learn content, but also about how they can learn that content most effectively. While faculty generally use testing as a unidirectional system for evaluation of student learning, awareness of the established science that demonstrates retrieval activities actually cause learning can dramatically improve education (Karpicke & Roediger 2008). Because retrieval is such a powerful learning enhancer, a summative test itself will strengthen students’ learning of the material. As such, increasing testing, quizzing, and retrieval activities during class time rather than only during a summative test will better align learning and testing. In addition, during the design of practices tests or summative assessments, faculty will inherently direct students’ selective attention to specific kinds of information. Because of the limited amount of time and content faculty can reasonably cover during a semester, it is important to test students only on the information that is most important for them to learn, remember, and use in the future. By assessing information that is fundamental to the learning or the learning needed to build increasingly complex ideas and concepts, faculty inherently communicate the key learning outcomes to students and denote what should be maintained in long-term memory. Fundamentally, faculty need to assess whether students have learned the course material. Educators can gain understanding of and enhance their students’ learning by adopting some simple practices both in and out of class that promote retrieval. In the next section, we provide four practices we have both used in our classroom teaching. We offer two evidence-based practices for incorporating retrieval practice in the college classroom. These two practices have two key features in common that are essential. First, they are low-stakes. Second, they all include feedback to the student about the accuracy of their responses. Teachers who eliminate the feedback component of retrieval risk leaving students with misconceptions or misinformation (Butler & Roediger, 2008). Peer Instruction was developed in the early 1990's by Eric Mazur to improve his students’ understanding of introductory physics through a seven-step protocol that drives conceptual understanding (Mazur, 1997). At the heart of Peer Instruction is the concept test, which engages students in active learning through retrieval. Faculty often utilize electronic classroom response systems (frequently or commonly referred to as “clickers”) to implement the process of Peer Instruction, but that is not required to use the essential protocol as described herein. To prepare for Peer Instruction, faculty should develop questions for classroom learning that are aligned to the depth and complexity of high-stakes assessments. During Peer Instruction, faculty pose a question to their class (Step 1). This question can be open-ended, multiple choice, and have a right or no right answer. Students are then given time to think individually about their answer, actively engaging in retrieval of knowledge or skill (Step 2). Next, students commit to their answer and record their response, often done using a classroom-response system (Schell, Lukoff, & Mazur, 2013) (Step 3). Critically, at this point in the sequence, faculty should not reveal the correct answer nor provide any guidance about the frequency of student responses. Next, faculty direct students to find someone with a different answer, discuss, and justify their responses with rationale and evidence (Step 4). After students discuss their responses, in the fifth step, students respond to the same question again with a revised answer or their original answer if they were not convinced to switch (Miller, Schell, Ho, Lukoff, & Mazur, 2015) (Step 5). Next, faculty engage in a rapid collection of student response data and then review those responses (Step 6). This allows them to formatively assess student understanding of the concept in the moment. To close the Peer Instruction sequence, faculty explain the correct answer or provide discussion and rationale if there is no correct answer. Faculty also provide feedback to students to eliminate misconceptions and ensure clear conceptualization of the content (Step 7). To read more about Peer Instruction, see the first author's blog at blog.peerinstruction.net (How to help people remember what they learned, January 8, 2016) or watch a 2 min video primer on the method here: https://blog.peerinstruction.net/2014/05/01/what-is-peer-instruction-in-2-mins/. Peer Instruction offers repeated retrieval attempts during a single cycle (Steps 2, 4, 5). Peer Instruction offers at least two varieties of retrieval practice: The sequence involves individual retrieval (Steps 2, 5) and retrieval through discussion with a peer (Step 5). Feedback (Step 7) and variability in retrieval enhance the ability for students to make inferences and transfer their learning of retrieved information to future testing events (Butler & Roediger, 2008; Butler, Black-Meier, Raley, & Marsh, 2017). Lyman (1981) introduced Think-Pair-Share (TPS) in the early 1980s as a way to engage and include students and enhance language development in classroom discussion. While we use Peer Instruction in our teaching practices, TPS offers an opportunity to engage students in repeated, variable retrieval with feedback. TPS has four basic steps: First, the instructor poses a question to the students (Step 1). The more broadly constructed the question, the more challenging the retrieval will be for the students. For example, a question like “What is Food Safety?” is likely to yield more robust and differentiated retrieval amongst a group of students than “What are the names of the top four food-borne illness-causing microorganisms?” because the first question is more complex and does not limit the detail in the potential response. Next, the teacher allows sufficient time for the students to think on their own (Step 2). With questions that are more complex or include a complex process, students should jot their responses on paper during their individual think time. During this think time, students should retrieve what they know un-aided by any texts, phones, or other resources. Students then pair with their neighbor for discussion (Step 3). In contrast to Peer Instruction, where students are strategically paired with someone who has a different answer, in TPS, students pair with their neighbors. Finally, students share what they “think” with their peer in a brief chat or discussion (Step 4). Before concluding a TPS cycle, the educator should provide feedback regarding the initial question. If, for example, the question was about a process, the instructor should highlight the steps in the process that are most important to remember. Using TPS during the first five minutes of class provides a window for the effective application of this practice whereby students are directed to recall the critical pieces from the last lesson, in lieu of a simple lecture re-cap done by the instructor. In this section, we offer two ways to use quizzing to extend learning beyond the class period and engage students in retrieval practice. To effectively use quizzing out-of-class, students need feedback no later than the conclusion of the quizzing session so that misconceptions are not reinforced through the process of the quiz. Butler and Roediger (2008) refer to delayed feedback as more effective than immediate feedback in developing long-term memory. In this case, delayed feedback refers to feedback that is provided at the conclusion of the quizzing period, rather than instant feedback, which would occur after each question. Developed in the 1990s, Just-in-Time Teaching (JITT) (Novak, Patterson, Gavrin, & Christian, 1999) is a research-based strategy designed to direct faculty to student misconceptions about subject matter. In a JITT classroom, students receive first exposure to subject matter before class, rather than during class. This exposure occurs through a coverage activity that faculty assign, such as a reading, lecture video, or audio clip. After completing the JITT assignment, students take a low-stakes quiz with the book or text closed independently outside of class. The design of this quiz provides faculty with the opportunity to direct students’ selective attention to the most important information for learning and future retrieval. Faculty then review students’ responses prior to the start of class to assess areas of misunderstanding or difficulty among their learners, which they can address “just-in-time” during class. However, the act of retrieving information during the pre-class quiz shifts the quiz from a pure assessment function to a learning function. The Just-in-Time Teaching approach is an easy to use method that better aligns students’ learning activities with how they will be tested. Allowing students to repeat the quiz until they have answered all the questions correctly provides robust data to inform the faculty about initial performance, pervasive misconceptions, and relative difficulty for students in preparation for the next class period. It also engages students in repeated retrieval practice that will strengthen their learning. One very simple way students can practice retrieval and warm their cognition up before a test is through a brain dump. A brain dump can be implemented in any number of ways, but involves students engaging in their usual study practice of rehearsal or repeated review for a set period of time. Then, instead of again re-reviewing or re-reading, the student takes a blank sheet of paper or opens a blank page on their word processor and writes everything they can remember about what they read in a timed environment, with no distractions. After the timer ends, students can assess what they have remembered and what they have missed using their notes or other materials. We recommend students engage in two to three brain dumps per study session. The first author allows students to complete a brain dump during the first 10 min of class before an exam as a mechanism for warming up for the complex retrieval activities during the test. Since the information was draw directly from the students’ memory and thus individual knowledge, they may certainly use their brain dump notes during the exam.1 Peer Instruction, TPS, JITT, and brain dumps are just four of hundreds of ways faculty can engage their students in retrieval practice. We recommend the book Make It Stick (Brown et al., 2014) for additional, practical examples for adoption of retrieval practice in classroom teaching. Effective test-taking requires effective learning, the encoding of content knowledge or procedural skill, and its requisite storage in long-term memory (Karpicke, 2016). It also involves successful retrieval and application of that knowledge and skill in a testing environment. Faculty construct tests as a means of evaluating students’ content knowledge, understanding, and procedural skill. However, tests also involve a series of cognitive tasks (see Table 1) that must proceed without a glitch for students to succeed on a test. Many of these tasks are unrelated to the depth of students’ subject-matter knowledge or expertise. For example, the amount of space available in a student's working memory is entirely separate from the amount, and depth of understanding, of content knowledge in their long-term memory. Unfortunately, most students do not practice with enough frequency the key cognitive tasks involved in testing during self-directed learning or study (Karpicke et al., 2009). Rather, students spend the majority of their time out of the classroom engaging in rehearsal (Bransford et al., 2000). Concomitantly, while active learning is becoming increasingly popular in higher education, classroom instruction still primarily features passive learning through listening to lectures and note-taking. Reading, review, listening, and note-taking are cognitive tasks that encourage lower-order cognitive skills, such as retention and comprehension of knowledge. Though lower order, these tasks are vital to the successful encoding required for initial learning. However, tests rarely assess students’ abilities to listen, re-read, highlight, or take notes. The misalignment between learning and testing results when students focus the majority of their learning on rehearsal, rather than the series of cognitive tasks they will be required to engage in during testing, puts the integrity of the educational process of assessment at risk. Incorporating retrieval-enhanced learning theory into classroom practice has implications for student learning and teaching. Examples of ways to help bridge the gap between testing and learning include: 1) Providing direct instruction to students on the misalignment between frequent approaches to learning during class time, including a description of retrieval and its importance in the syllabus, and 2) Employing research-based strategies that help students practice the cognitive tasks engaged in testing in and out of class. Using retrieval-enhanced learning theory as a fundamental part of your teaching craft offers a powerful way to align testing and learning and to answer the enduring question, how do I authentically measure if my students are genuinely learning anything? The authors acknowledge Dr. Eric Mazur for his contributions to their understanding of Peer Instruction and Drs. Andrew C. Butler and Pooja Agarwal for their contributions to their understanding of retrieval-enhanced learning theory. The first author acknowledges the Fennema Lectureship, the Institute of Food Technologists, and Dr. Shelly J. Schmidt for introducing her to the field of Food Science and for the invitation to contribute this essay.