Testing unsuccessfully: A specification of the underlying mechanisms supporting its influence on retention

Knight, Justin B.; Ball, Barbara; Brewer, Gene A.; Dewitt, Michael R.; Marsh, Richard L.

doi:10.1016/j.jml.2011.12.008

Cited by 63 publications

(117 citation statements)

References 58 publications

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“…Additionally, this pattern of results would seem to call for a reconsideration of claims made by proponents of errorless learning, who would argue that the making of errors should be avoided during learning activities, with the assumption that such errors will tend to persist and thereby impair future correct learning (e.g., Guthrie, 1952;Skinner, 1958). We also see the pattern of results obtained in the present Experiments 1 and 2 to be consistent with findings observed by Kornell et al (2009;see also, Carpenter, 2011;Grimaldi & Karpicke, 2012;Hays, Kornell, & Bjork 2013;Huelser & Metcalfe, 2012;Knight, Ball, Brewer, DeWitt, & Marsh, 2012;Kornell, 2014;Vaughn & Rawson, 2012;Yue et al 2015) in their research on test-potentiated learning.…”

Section: Multiple-choice Pretesting and The Retention Of Pretested Insupporting

confidence: 85%

Multiple-choice pretesting potentiates learning of related information

Little

Bjork

2016

Mem Cogn

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Although the testing effect has received a substantial amount of empirical attention, such research has largely focused on the effects of tests given after study. The present research examines the effect of using tests prior to study (i.e., as pretests), focusing particularly on how pretesting influences the subsequent learning of information that is not itself pretested but that is related to the pretested information. In Experiment 1, we found that multiple-choice pretesting was better for the learning of such related information than was cued-recall pretesting or a pre-fact-study control condition. In Experiment 2, we found that the increased learning of nonpretested related information following multiple-choice testing could not be attributed to increased time allocated to that information during subsequent study. Last, in Experiment 3, we showed that the benefits of multiple-choice pretesting over cued-recall pretesting for the learning of related information persist over 48 hours, thus demonstrating the promise of multiple-choice pretesting to potentiate learning in educational contexts. A possible explanation for the observed benefits of multiple-choice pretesting for enhancing the effectiveness with which related nontested information is learned during subsequent study is discussed.Keywords Pretesting . Testing effects . Learning . Multiple choice . Test-potentiated learning That pretesting can potentiate the learning of pretested information during subsequent study has been demonstrated for a variety of materials and across a variety of methodologies (e.g., Arnold & McDermott, 2013;Kornell, Hays, & Bjork, 2009). This finding has clear applications for learning in educational contexts (Anderson & Biddle, 1975;Kane & Anderson, 1978;Pressley, Tanenbaum, McDaniel, & Wood, 1990;Richland, Kornell, & Kao;Rothkopf, 1966). Relatively little work, however, has examined whether such pretesting can also potentiate the learning of information that was not itself pretested, or instead, whether the learning of such information might be impaired by such pretesting. This question is particularly pertinent to conditions in which such non-pretested material is related to, and thereby potentially confusable or competitive with, the specifically pretested information.The issue raised previously is important because students are often presented with large amounts of related and thus potentially confusable information (e.g., anatomy, geography, history courses), and they are sometimes pretested on subsets of that information (e.g., with Bclicker^questions presented at the beginning of a lecture), followed by more comprehensive exams that would actually count toward their grades and that would include the testing of non-pretested related information as well. Of particular interest in the present research was whether, and if so how, pretesting might improve the learning of such related, and thus possibly competitive, non-pretested information. The present research

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Section: Multiple-choice Pretesting and The Retention Of Pretested Insupporting

confidence: 85%

Multiple-choice pretesting potentiates learning of related information

Little

Bjork

2016

Mem Cogn

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“…In their study-only condition, on the other hand, pairs such as Whale: Mammal were shown for the full 13 s. The guess-first condition produced better later recall of the correct target than did the study-only condition, despite the shorter study time and the reasonable expectation that generating a competing associate would create proactive interference. Kornell et al's basic finding has now been replicated by a number of other investigators (Grimaldi & Karpicke, 2012;Hays, Kornell, & Bjork, 2013;Huelser & Metcalfe, 2012;Knight, Ball, Brewer, DeWitt, & Marsh, 2012;Vaughn & Rawson, 2012), as well as with foreign language learning (Potts & Shanks, 2014) and more semantically rich text passages (Richland, Kornell, & Kao, 2009) and trivia facts (Kornell, 2014).…”

mentioning

confidence: 78%

“…The errorful generation paradigm-as used by Kornell et al and in subsequent follow-up studies (Grimaldi & Karpicke, 2012;Huelser & Metcalfe, 2012;Knight et al, 2012;Potts & Shanks, 2014;Vaughn & Rawson, 2012)-ensures that the guess is almost always wrong, leaving open the possibility that when presented with the cue at final test, participants are able to simply select whatever response they did not generate for themselves. Therefore, we rigged Experiment 2 so that, in one condition, half of participants' guesses were always deemed to be correct, and compared the benefit of making errors in this condition with the original condition where just about all the guesses were incorrect.…”

Section: Questions and Issues Motivating The Present Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Prior studies have used very short retention intervals in which participants are readily able to retrieve their initial guesses and to distinguish their guesses from the correct targets (e.g., Knight et al, 2012;Vaughn & Rawson, 2012). A question that remains, however, is whether incorrect guesses might become interfering at a long delay.…”

Section: Questions and Issues Motivating The Present Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Why does guessing incorrectly enhance, rather than impair, retention?

Yan

Garcia

et al. 2014

Mem Cogn

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The finding that trying, and failing, to predict the upcoming to-be-remembered response to a given cue can enhance later recall of that response, relative to studying the intact cue-response pair, is surprising, especially given that the standard paradigm (e.g., Kornell, Hays, & Bjork, 2009) involves allocating what would otherwise be study time to generating an error. In three experiments, we sought to eliminate two potential heuristics that participants might use to aid recall of correct responses on the final test and to explore the effects of interference both at an immediate and at a delayed test. In Experiment 1, by intermixing strongly associated to-be-remembered pairs with weakly associated pairs, we eliminated a potential heuristic participants can use on the final test in the standard version of the paradigm-namely, that really strong associates are incorrect responses. In Experiment 2, by rigging half of the participants' responses to be correct, we eliminated another potential heuristic-namely, that one's initial guesses are virtually always wrong. In Experiment 3, we examined whether participants' ability to remember-and discriminate between-their incorrect guesses and correct responses would be lost after a 48-h delay, when source memory should be reduced. Across all experiments, we continued to find a robust benefit of trying to guess to-be-learned responses, even when incorrect, versus studying intact cue-response pairs. The benefits of making incorrect guesses are not an artifact of the paradigm, nor are they limited to short retention intervals.

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“…Despite this short-term performance hindrance, generation still enhances long-term learning. Even more compelling evidence in favor of the learning-performance distinction comes from research that has revealed that learning can profit from generation attempts that are assured to be incorrect during acquisition, a phenomenon that was demonstrated some time ago (Kane & Anderson, 1978;Slamecka & Fevreiski, 1983) and is now garnering considerable empirical attention once again (Grimaldi & Karpicke, 2012;Hays, Kornell, & Bjork, 2013;Huelser & Metcalfe, 2012;Knight, Ball, Brewer, DeWitt, & Marsh, 2012;Kornell, Hays, & Bjork, 2009;Potts & Shanks, 2014;Yan, Yu, Garcia, & Bjork, 2014).…”

Section: Verbal Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning Versus Performance

Soderstrom

Bjork

2015

Perspect Psychol Sci

469

306

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The primary goal of instruction should be to facilitate long-term learning-that is, to create relatively permanent changes in comprehension, understanding, and skills of the types that will support long-term retention and transfer. During the instruction or training process, however, what we can observe and measure is performance, which is often an unreliable index of whether the relatively long-term changes that constitute learning have taken place. The time-honored distinction between learning and performance dates back decades, spurred by early animal and motor-skills research that revealed that learning can occur even when no discernible changes in performance are observed. More recently, the converse has also been shown-specifically, that improvements in performance can fail to yield significant learning-and, in fact, that certain manipulations can have opposite effects on learning and performance. We review the extant literature in the motor- and verbal-learning domains that necessitates the distinction between learning and performance. In addition, we examine research in metacognition that suggests that people often mistakenly interpret their performance during acquisition as a reliable guide to long-term learning. These and other considerations suggest that the learning-performance distinction is critical and has vast practical and theoretical implications.

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Testing unsuccessfully: A specification of the underlying mechanisms supporting its influence on retention

Cited by 63 publications

References 58 publications

Multiple-choice pretesting potentiates learning of related information

Multiple-choice pretesting potentiates learning of related information

Why does guessing incorrectly enhance, rather than impair, retention?

Learning Versus Performance

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