The "testing" phenomenon refers to the finding that students who take a test on material between the time they first study and the time they take a final test remember more of the material than students who do not take an intervening test. 4 experiments examined the testing phenomenon in student's memory for brief passages and labels for parts of flowers. Experiments la and lb demonstrated the generality of the phenomenon to the methods and materials used in the current study. Experiment 2 ruled out an "amount of processing" hypothesis as a way of accounting for the testing phenomenon. The results of Experiment 3 seemed to indicate that the testing phenomenon resided in the number of complete retrieval events. Experiments 4a, 4b, and 4c focused on the completeness of retrieval events and indicated that the influence of retrieval on later memory performance was determined, at least in part, by the completeness of the initial retrieval event.

The authors contrasted massed repeated reading with distributed repeated reading. In Experiment 1, massed repeated reading led to better passage recall than distributed repeated reading. In Experiment 2, massed repeated reading of a paraphrased version of an essay led to greater recall than massed repeated reading of a verbatim version of an essay. Although distributed repeated reading again led to greater recall than massed repeated reading, the distributed repeated reading of paraphrased version of an essay did not lead to greater levels of recall than the distributed repeated reading of a verbatim version of an essay. Results of Experiment 3 confirmed those of Experiment 2 and indicated that readers commit significantly less inspection time to a 2nd reading in a massed repeated reading situation than to a 2nd reading in distributed repeated reading situation. The results are discussed from the perspective of a deactivation hypothesis.

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In two experiments, we examined the "spacing" effect in students' memory for paragraphs and brief lectures. In the first experiment, students who read massed verbatim repetitions of paragraphs recalled less of the content than did students who read verbatim repetitions spaced across time. In addition, students who read paraphrased versions of the paragraphs in massed repetitions recalled as much as did students who read the paragraphs in the spaced conditions. For Experiment 2, we used a brief lecture as the to-be-learned material and replicated the results of Experiment I.

Instructions, reinforcement (team points), and practice were applied to four behaviorally defined creative behaviors of eight fourth-and fifth-grade students. All four aspects (number of different responses, fluency; number of verb forms, flexibility; number of words per response, elaboration; and statistical infrequency of response forms, originality) were demonstrated to be under experimental control. The procedures also raised students' scores on Torrance's tests of creativity. Application of the experimental procedures may well be practical for classroom teachers.