Katy Burgess, Cardiff University
Testing is a loaded term. When people think of testing, they think of assessment. Anxiety. Stress. Judgement. A number, meant to capture how good or bad your knowledge is on a particular topic.
But what if I told you that we should not see testing as a form of assessment? We should see testing as a form of learning (Burgess, 2024). There is over a century of research, and dozens of meta-analyses showing that retrieving information from memory is better for memory than other types of learning (e.g., Yang et al., 2021). Students commonly make and re-read notes to feel confident with new information, which does serve a purpose. It increases student familiarity with the information, so students feel more confident that they know it and that they will remember it. However, if you test them on that information a couple of days later, or a week later, they will have forgotten the majority of what they read (e.g., Roediger & Karpicke, 2006).
Contrast this with testing. If you get students to remember as much as they can, or answer a series of multiple choice or open-ended questions about the material, they will remember that much better in the future. So, despite commonly being seen as an end-product of the learning process, testing can be used to form longer-term learning for new information. However, students do not think they will remember it as well as material they have read.
So here lies a problem. Testing is a great strategy for long-term memory formation. But students do not tend to use this strategy because, among other reasons, they don’t realise its benefits. And neither do many educators or Higher Education institutions. There is a move away from regular assessments, because there is concern that we are over-assessing and over-burdening our students. And yes, assessment can bring with it anxiety, but part of how we assess students at University should give them space to make mistakes, reflect, and learn. In this process we can reduce anxiety. In fact, a recent meta-analysis shows that regular testing reduces student anxiety (e.g. Yang et al., 2023), and other work shows that the benefit of learning from testing occurs even when a student experiences test anxiety (Yang et al., 2020). Contrast this with one or two high stakes assessments asking different things of students across a semester (say, an essay and a practical report). Students are more hesitant to make mistakes, and feel more stressed and anxious about the mark because it has high stakes that will impact their final degree classification.
Rather than putting the onus onto the students to regularly test themselves, there are things we can do as educators to encourage both retrieval and mistakes through learning, such as no- or low-stakes testing. This has a range of benefits which I will elaborate on in a follow-up blog.
The key take home here though is that testing is learning, and we need to support students to practice retrieving information and recognise that mistakes are a key part of learning (e.g., Potts & Shanks, 2016).
Associated read – Part 2: Published Friday, 27 September 2024
References:
Burgess, K. V. (2024, April 30). Why we should test our students more. https://wonkhe.com/blogs/why-we-should-test-our-students-more/
Potts, R., Davies, G., & Shanks, D. R. (2019). The benefit of generating errors during learning: What is the locus of the effect? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 45(6), 1023–1041. https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000637
Roediger, H. L. III, & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01693.x
Yang, C., Li, J., Zhao, W., Luo, L., & Shanks, D. R. (2023). Do practice tests (quizzes) reduce or provoke test anxiety? A meta-analytic review. Educational Psychology Review, 35(3), Article 87. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-023-09801-w
Yang, C., Luo, L., Vadillo, M. A., Yu, R., & Shanks, D. R. (2021). Testing (quizzing) boosts classroom learning: A systematic and meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 147(4), 399–435. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000309
Yang, C., Sun, B., Potts, R., Yu, R., Luo, L., & Shanks, D. R. (2020). Do working memory capacity and test anxiety modulate the beneficial effects of testing on new learning? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 26(4):724-738. doi: https://doi.org/10.1037/xap0000278
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