Test-potentiated Learning Research Articles

How do testing and test-potentiated learning versus worked example method affect medium- and long-term knowledge in abstract algebra for pre-service mathematics teachers?

The retention of foundational knowledge is crucial in learning and teaching mathematics. However, a significant part of university students do not achieve long-term knowledge and problem-solving skills. A possible tool to increase further retention is testing, the strategic use of retrieval to enhance memory. In this study, the effect of a special kind of testing versus worked examples was investigated in an authentic educational setting, in an algebra course for pre-service mathematics teachers. The potential benefits of using tests versus showing students worked examples at the end of each practice session during a semester were examined. According to the results, there was no difference between the effectiveness of the two methods in the medium term—on the midterm that students took on the 6th week and the final that students took on the 13th week of the semester, the testing group performed the same as the worked example group. However, testing was more beneficial regarding long-term retention in studying and solving problems in abstract mathematics. Analyzing the results of the post-test that students took five months after their final test, the authors found that the improvement of those students who learned the material with testing was significantly larger than that of the worked example group. These findings suggest that testing can have a meaningful effect on abstract algebra knowledge and a long-lasting impact on solving complex, abstract mathematical problems.

Retrieval practice and test-potentiated learning: A comparison of high and low prior topic knowledge students in terms of procedural fluency and conceptual understanding

A cohort of pre-service mathematics students was exposed to a teaching strategy based on retrieval practice and test-potentiated learning. The aim of the study was to determine how high and low prior topic knowledge study participants compare in terms of their procedural fluency and conceptual understanding after exposure to the teaching strategy. A pre-test and post-test repeated measures design was employed in the study to compare within groups. A revised taxonomy table based on Bloom’s taxonomy was utilised to categorise test items. Findings indicate significant differences between pre-test and post-test scores within groups. Results from the independent samples t-test show a significant difference between the two groups. Outcomes confirm that the benefits of retrieval practice are greatest for unfamiliar content. Findings indicate that for low prior topic knowledge students, procedural fluency is enhanced and retained more than conceptual understanding whereas for the high prior topic knowledge students it was the reverse. The strategy was not as effective for improving conceptual understanding.Contribution: How a teaching strategy based on retrieval practice and test-potentiated learning affects the mathematical competencies of procedural fluency and conceptual understanding has not been researched. There is also a dearth of studies that set out to investigate how retrieval practice and test-potentiated learning affect research participants with different levels of prior knowledge. The contribution of this study therefore is to contribute to understanding of how retrieval practice and test-potentiated learning can be utilised to improve learning and teaching of mathematics at the school level.

Effects of spaced, repeated retrieval practice and test-potentiated learning on mathematical knowledge and reasoning

Effects of spaced, repeated retrieval practice and test-potentiated learning on mathematical knowledge and reasoning in an authentic educational setting are investigated in the study. Research participants were a cohort of second-year pre-service mathematics teachers. A revised taxonomy table was utilized to measure the knowledge and reasoning proficiency of participants. Findings indicate that the intervention was effective in enhancing categories, where familiar algorithmic reasoning and procedural knowledge were required. It was less effective with categories requiring flexible and creative use of conceptual and procedural knowledge. Theories of storage and retrieval strength and conceptual knowledge are used to explain the findings.

"Retrieval potentiates new learning: A theoretical and meta-analytic review": Correction to Chan, Meissner, and Davis (2018).

Reports an error in "Retrieval potentiates new learning: A theoretical and meta-analytic review" by Jason C. K. Chan, Christian A. Meissner and Sara D. Davis (Psychological Bulletin, 2018[Nov], Vol 144[11], 1111-1146). In the article, the Appendix and Supplemental Materials contained errors. Specifically, some of the data were mis-sorted, so that the effect sizes for some studies were misattributed to other studies, with most of the errors occurring in the intrusion data. These errors were confined to the table presented in the article's Appendix and Supplemental Materials, and they were not present in the data file from which the authors conducted all analyses. A corrected version of the Supplemental Materials has been provided online. Corrected studies have been highlighted in this table. Further, a column with the heading "Updated" has been added. Any data that have been updated are marked with a "Y" in this column. In addition, the authors have published an updated, correct data file on the Open Science Framework with the DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/7WUFC and accessible via the URL: https://osf.io/7wufc. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2018-48082-001.) A growing body of research has shown that retrieval can enhance future learning of new materials. In the present report, we provide a comprehensive review of the literature on this finding, which we term test-potentiated new learning. Our primary objectives were to (a) produce an integrative review of the existing theoretical explanations, (b) summarize the extant empirical data with a meta-analysis, (c) evaluate the existing accounts with the meta-analytic results, and (d) highlight areas that deserve further investigations. Here, we identified four nonexclusive classes of theoretical accounts, including resource accounts, metacognitive accounts, context accounts, and integration accounts. Our quantitative review of the literature showed that testing reliably potentiates the future learning of new materials by increasing correct recall or by reducing erroneous intrusions, and several factors have a powerful impact on whether testing potentiates or impairs new learning. Results of a metaregression analysis provide considerable support for the integration account. Lastly, we discuss areas of under-investigation and possible directions for future research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Does Retrieval Enhance Suggestibility Because It Increases Perceived Credibility of the Postevent Information?

Despite the robust memory-enhancing benefits of retrieval practice, an initial test can sometimes exacerbate eyewitness’ susceptibility to subsequent misinformation—a phenomenon known as retrieval-enhanced suggestibility. One explanation for this finding is that after taking a memory test, participant witnesses are more likely to treat the subsequently presented misinformation narrative as being credible (the misinformation acceptance account; e.g., Chan, Manley, & Lang, 2017 ). Another explanation suggests that prior testing enhances participants’ ability to learn the post-event misinformation (the test-potentiated learning account; Chan et al., 2017 ). In two experiments, we provided a direct test of these alternative hypotheses and showed that testing did not make participants believe the content of the narrative to be more accurate, and the perceived accuracy of the narrative was not associated with the likelihood of misinformation recall. These results are inconsistent with the misinformation acceptance account.

Test-potentiated learning: three independent replications, a disconfirmed hypothesis, and an unexpected boundary condition

ABSTRACTArnold and McDermott [(2013). Test-potentiated learning: Distinguishing between direct and indirect effects of testing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 39, 940–945] isolated the indirect effects of testing and concluded that encoding is enhanced to a greater extent following more versus fewer practice tests, referred to as test-potentiated learning. The current research provided further evidence for test-potentiated learning and evaluated the covert retrieval hypothesis as an alternative explanation for the observed effect. Learners initially studied foreign language word pairs and then completed either one or five practice tests before restudy occurred. Results of greatest interest concern performance on test trials following restudy for items that were not correctly recalled on the test trials that preceded restudy. Results replicate Arnold and McDermott (2013) by demonstrating that more versus fewer tests potentiate learning when trial time is limited. Results also provide strong evidence against the covert retrieval hypothesis concerning why the effect occurs (i.e., it does not reflect differential covert retrieval during pre-restudy trials). In addition, outcomes indicate that the magnitude of the test-potentiated learning effect decreases as trial length increases, revealing an unexpected boundary condition to test-potentiated learning.

A dual memory theory of the testing effect.

A new theoretical framework for the testing effect-the finding that retrieval practice is usually more effective for learning than are other strategies-is proposed, the empirically supported tenet of which is that separate memories form as a consequence of study and test events. A simplest case quantitative model is derived from that framework for the case of cued recall. With no free parameters, that model predicts both proportion correct in the test condition and the magnitude of the testing effect across 10 experiments conducted in our laboratory, experiments that varied with respect to material type, retention interval, and performance in the restudy condition. The model also provides the first quantitative accounts of (a) the testing effect as a function of performance in the restudy condition, (b) the upper bound magnitude of the testing effect, (c) the effect of correct answer feedback, (d) the testing effect as a function of retention interval for the cases of feedback and no feedback, and (e) the effect of prior learning method on subsequent learning through testing. Candidate accounts of several other core phenomena in the literature, including test-potentiated learning, recognition versus cued recall training effects, cued versus free recall final test effects, and other select transfer effects, are also proposed. Future prospects and relations to other theories are discussed.

The forward effects of testing on eyewitness memory: The tension between suggestibility and learning

Abstract Research has consistently demonstrated that taking a test prior to receiving misleading information can increase misinformation susceptibility (Chan, Thomas, & Bulevich, 2009). However, research has also demonstrated that testing enhances subsequent learning (e.g., Tulving & Watkins, 1974; Wissman, Rawson, & Pyc, 2011). The goal of the present study was to examine these seemingly contradictory effects of testing. In two experiments we tested the hypothesis that testing influences how post-test information is processed. Depending on the nature of the later memory test, test-related processing can result in either memory errors or enhanced learning effects. Experiment 1 indicated that testing may result in elaborative processing of post-test material, resulting an increase in misinformation suggestibility. Experiment 2 suggested that increased suggestibility after testing may be understood as test-related learning of post-test material. Taken together, the results suggest that interim testing occurring between an original event and post-event misinformation may enhance memory suggestibility, because testing results in elaborative processing of subsequent material. However, interim testing also helps segregate memory for each source, resulting in test-potentiated learning within the misinformation paradigm.

Test-potentiated learning of motor sequences

ABSTRACTWe investigated effects of retrieving body movements from memory on subsequent re-encoding of these movements (i.e., test-potentiated learning). In Experiment 1, participants first learned to perform 12 sequential finger movements as responses to letter stimuli. Eight of these movements then had to be recalled in response to their stimuli (initial test). Subsequently, learning trials were repeated for four of the previously to-be-retrieved movements as well as the previously not-to-be-retrieved movements. Restudy benefited from prior retrieval. In a final test, again requiring motoric recall in response to letter stimuli, performance was better for restudied items that were previously cued for retrieval as compared to items that had been restudied without prior retrieval. However, no such indirect testing benefit occurred when initial and final testing formats were incongruent, that is, when participants had to recall the stimuli in response to movements as cues at the final test. In Experiment 2, we replicated the finding of test-potentiated learning with a different design, manipulating initial-testing status between participants.

Partial testing can potentiate learning of tested and untested material from multimedia lessons.

Test-potentiated learning occurs when testing renders a subsequent study period more effective than it would have been without an intervening test. We examined whether testing only a subset of material from a multimedia lesson would potentiate the restudy of both tested and untested material. In Experiments 1a and 1b, participants studied a multimedia lesson about star formation and then read facts (read participants) or took a test (test participants) on half the information from the lesson. All participants then restudied the entire lesson before taking a final cued-recall test after a 5-min (Experiment 1a) or 20-min (Experiment 1b) delay. On the final test, evidence for test potentiation was observed: Test participants recalled just as much untested material as tested material, whereas read participants recalled less of the unread information than the read information. Furthermore, untested information was better recalled than unread information. The results from these experiments suggest that taking a test on some information from a multimedia lesson aids restudy of both tested and untested information more effectively than does reading that same subset of information. Additionally, in Experiment 2, we found the potentiating benefit of testing to extend to the learning of new, unrelated information—specifically, the learning of a multimedia lesson on a completely different topic. Across all experiments, however, the test participants—despite learning more as reflected by final test performance—reported lower confidence regarding how well they had learned the material than did the read participants. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

Looking for answers in all the wrong places: How testing facilitates learning of misinformation

Abstract Research has consistently demonstrated that taking a test prior to receiving misleading information increases eyewitness suggestibility (Chan, Thomas, & Bulevich, 2009). Retrieval Enhanced Suggestibility (RES) is characterized by two typical findings: (1) reduced access to the originally witnessed event, which has been contextualized within a reconsolidation framework (e.g., Chan & LaPaglia, 2013), and (2) increased production of misleading post-test narrative details, which has been discussed as an example of test-potentiated learning (Gordon & Thomas, 2014). The present study focused on this latter finding, and examined attention as a potential factor moderating the relationship between initial testing and narrative detail production. We hypothesized that initial testing would influence endogenous attention allocation to details in the post-event narrative, thereby impacting narrative learning. We found that compared to participants who did not take an initial test, participants who took an initial test focused efforts on processing narrative details that were directly relevant to initial test questions, and this differential attention allocation was directly related to final test misinformation production. These experiments provide support for the view that testing enhances susceptibility to misinformation by potentiating learning of post-event information. In addition, the present findings support the conclusion that initial test questions and answers function as endogenous cues to direct attention during post-test learning.

Neural Signatures of Test-Potentiated Learning in Parietal Cortex

Testing, or retrieval practice, is beneficial for long-term memory both directly, by enhancing performance on tested information, and indirectly, by facilitating learning from subsequent encounters with the information. Although a wealth of behavioral research has examined the "testing effect," neuroimaging has provided little insight regarding the potential mechanisms that underlie the benefits of retrieval practice. Here, fMRI was used to examine the effects of retrieval practice on later study trials. Human subjects studied pairs of associated words, which were then tested, restudied, or neither tested nor restudied. All pairs were then studied once more in expectation of a final test. We asked how this Final Study episode was affected by prior history (whether the pair had been previously tested, restudied, or neither). The data revealed striking similarities between responses in lateral parietal cortex in the present study and those in a host of studies explicitly tapping recognition memory processes. Moreover, activity in lateral parietal cortex during Final Study was correlated with a behavioral index of test-potentiated learning. We conclude that retrieval practice may enhance learning by promoting the recruitment of retrieval mechanisms during subsequent study opportunities.

Test-potentiated learning: distinguishing between direct and indirect effects of tests.

The facilitative effect of retrieval practice, or testing, on the probability of later retrieval has been the focus of much recent empirical research. A lesser known benefit of retrieval practice is that it may also enhance the ability of a learner to benefit from a subsequent restudy opportunity. This facilitative effect of retrieval practice on subsequent encoding is known as test-potentiated learning. Thus far, however, the literature has not isolated the indirect effect of retrieval practice on subsequent memory (via enhancing the effectiveness of restudy) from the direct effects of retrieval on subsequent memory. The experiment presented here uses conditional probability to disentangle test-potentiated learning from the direct effects of retrieval practice. The results indicate that unsuccessful retrieval attempts enhance the effectiveness of subsequent restudy, demonstrating that tests do potentiate subsequent learning.