Disparate Effects of Repeated Testing: Reconciling Ballard's (1913) and Bartlett's (1932) Results

Abstract

In the course of daily affairs. we are frequently asked or required to recollect the same events from memory. This repeated recollection may occur in educational contexts, as when people are tested on material during the course of a semester and later receive a cumulative final exam. Similarly, eyewitnesses to crimes may be queried repeatedly about what they observed by police, by friends, by lawyers, and then eventualIy in court. More commonly, we all repeatedly retell stories of favorite or notable events in our lives. Despite the ubiquity of such experiences, the ftralegy of repeatedly testing memory has not been the dominant method of studying how memories change over time. Rather, researchers have generally employed between-subjects comparisons, in which . Address correspondeliLc: L, ,*iilhor\ at the Department of Psychology. Rice U n i v usity, Houston, TX 77,-7 i i . l X i i 3 independent groups learn some material irnd then are tested at various times after thc original learning to measure the course of forgetting. This design has the advantage of delayed tests being uncontaminated by recollections on previous tests. as would occur if a within-subjects design were used. However. the "contaminating" influences of previous tests can be of central interest in their own right, with the eyewitness testimony situation representing a prime example (Loftus, 1979). Therefore, the repeated testing of memory for the same events (without intervening study opportunities) also represents a valid, if less used, approach to changes in retention over time.Several experimental paradigms and research traditions have been used to examine effects of repeated testing on memory. For present purposes, we confine interest to those cases in which the tests were given without overt cues (free recall). The most famous example of this technique is that of Bartlett (1932), who gave college students the Indian folktale "The War of the Ghosts" and then tested them repeatedly. He presented no aggregate data to support his conclusions, but rather provided sample recall protocols from his subjects. He reported that their performance became increasingly poor over time; they forgot the story but reconstructed plausible accounts that were skewed to the more typical schema of a fairy tale, a style that was presumably more familiar to his students. Despite the fact that Bartlett (1932, pp. 3-4) criticized the pioneering work of Ebbinghaus (1885/1964), his conclusions about the course of forgetting were broadly consistent with Ebbinghaus's prior work. Of course, his theoretical emphasis was markedly different.Curiously. a second tradition of repeated testing research, begun by Ballard ( I9 13). leads to the opposite conclusion from Bartlett's belter publicized work. Ballard gave schoolchildren poetry and Ic.,led their memories both soon after learning and then again at various periods up to I week later. He reported that children frequently recalled lines of poetry on later tests that were not recalled on earlier ones, a phenomenon he termed r...

Recall, recognition, and confidence patterns in eyewitness testimony

“…With short intervals between trials, recall improves (Wheeler and Roediger, 1992) and narrations become longer (Dunning and Stern, 1992;Scrivner and Safer, 1988), but in this study recall did not increase equally for all contents, improving only slightly in regard to central details. The ®rst recall revolved around actions and in the second trial subjects repeated the narration, ®lling it in mainly with peripheral details.…”

Assessment drives learning: An unavoidable truth?

“…The act of taking the test has proven to be the actuator in promoting memory retention, and not just the process of going over the material again in preparation for the test (Larsen et al, 2008). Repeated testing has been shown to promote better retention than taking a single test (Wheeler and Roediger, 1992). The benefits of repeated testing have proven greater still when testing is distributed over time (Landauer and Bjork, 1978;Karpicke and Roediger, 2007).…”

Bartlett's schema theory: The unreplicated “portrait d'homme” series from 1932

“…Another possible reason for the results could be the fact that the first delay between inspection and reproduction was of 15 min only, whereas the following delays between the reproduction sessions were of one week. Taking into account that the reproduction sessions are test situations for the participants, reproduction 15 min after studying the stimulus possibly enhances later retention (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006;Wheeler & Roediger, 1992). Therefore, it does not seem surprising that the picture material of the participants did not change in a significant way with subsequent reproductions.…”

“…This was done to increase the probability of forgetting the initially inspected stimuli following the finding of long intervals between tests potentially facilitate forgetting (Wheeler & Roediger, 1992). This slight adaptation of the experimental procedure should increase the influence of a face schema biasing retrieval towards it.…”

“…We would like to summarize this factor as the "naming hypothesis". Other factors influencing specific schemata might be the delay between inspection and reproduction of stimuli (see Wheeler & Roediger, 1992), the context and instruction during both phases (von Hippel, Jonides, Hilton, & Narayan, 1993), and the specific kind of reproduction technique-for example, "repeated reproduction", during which people have to reproduce their own reproduction again and again, or "serial reproduction" (see Bartlett, 1932), which follows the idea of Chinese whispers. Although Bartlett's schema theory is clearly an important part of the classic theories of cognitive psychology and is obviously present in everyday life experiences, empirical proof of his original experiments on remembering (Bartlett, 1932) using picture material is sparse, and paradigms have not been replicated so far.…”