Sorry, Kids: Study Shows Testing Actually Improves Learning

Students may be unhappy to hear this, but a new study shows that testing actually improves learning.

Researchers led by Jeffrey D. Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University, found that testing was a more effective tool for retaining information than rereading or diagramming. Practically speaking, this means that students studying for exams are better off testing themselves than going over a text, rereading notes or diagramming information.

"When students have the material right in front of them, they think they know it better than they actually do," Karpicke said in a statement. "Many students do not realize that putting the material away and practicing retrieval is such a potent study strategy."

The study, published Thursday in the journal Science, involved two experiments with 200 students.

In the first experiment, they divided the students into four groups and gave them all a scientific passage to read. A week later, the students would take a short-answer test to determine how much information they had retained.

Group one read the text for five minutes. Group two had four five-minute sessions to study the text. Group three drew a concept map of the material (essentially a diagram of how concepts relate to one another) while reading the passage. Group four read the text and then took a "passage retrieval" test in which they had 10 minutes to write down everything they remembered. They then read the passage again and repeated the exercise.

One week later, the four groups took a short-answer test to see how well they could recall the information and draw conclusions from it. Karpicke found that the students who did a retrieval test after reading the passage retained approximately 50 percent more one week later than the students who reread the passage four times and the students who used concept mapping.

In the second experiment, students each did an exercise using concept mapping and one using retrieval practice testing. When using concept mapping, they provided more detail than when they were asked to recall what they had read. But one week later, the retrieval testers did better than the concept mappers both on a short-answer test and when they were asked to draw a concept map.

The researchers also asked the students to predict how much they would remember a week later. The ones who took the retrieval test predicted they would remember less than the students using the other methods. But the opposite turned out to be true.

The reasons behind the results are unknown, the New York Times reports. But there are a few theories. One suggests that practice makes perfect.

"When we use our memories by retrieving things, we change our access," Robert Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, told the Times. "What we recall becomes more recallable in the future. In a sense, you are practicing what you are going to need to do later."

Similarly, the struggle to remember might help you learn more by not creating an aura of overconfidence.

"The struggle helps you learn, but it makes you feel like you're not learning," Nate Kornell, a psychologist at Williams College, told the Times. "You feel like, 'I don't know it that well. This is hard, and I'm having trouble coming up with this information.'"

But on the other hand, rereading texts and diagramming information that's right in front of you might give you the sense that you know the material better than you actually do.