To the students who cram, diagram or study in groups: You've met your match. The results of a new study published last month in the journal "Science" show that the most effective way to learn material is to be, well, tested on it.
The study, conducted by Jeffrey Karpicke, assistant professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University, and Janell Blunt, a student in the department, tested the effectiveness of retrieval practice — a method that involves reading information, then immediately taking a test that forces the individual to recall the material.
In one of two experiments conducted under the study, the testers gave 200 undergraduate students a text and divided them into four groups. Each group had the same amount of time to study the text and employed one of four methods: The first group studied the passage in one session, the second in four consecutive sessions, the third studied the text and then created a detailed diagram of the information and the fourth used the retrieval method.
After a week, the students took a final comprehensive test on the passage they had read. The study revealed that the students who used retrieval practice retained about 50 percent more of the information than the other students in the experiment.
The students in the study were also asked to guess how much they would remember a week later. Ironically, the students who used the retrieval method were the least confident in their ability to remember the information but ended up performing the best on the final test.
"The key thing is not that they were taking a test; it is that they were put in a position where they had to reconstruct something for themselves, by themselves," Tufts Professor of Education David Hammer said. "If you are going to study for something, don't look at a book. Look at a blank piece of paper and reproduce what you have learned. Students don't recognize how important that is."
Experience, Hammer said, is a key part of learning.
"Reading the book is like watching a swimming instructor show the strokes; you have to actually get in the water and do the strokes yourself to really learn them," he said.
Assistant Professor of Psychology Ayanna Thomas agreed with the study's results, adding that the retrieval practice is so valuable because of the effect it has on cognitive processes.
"It likely develops what people have called more useful and more elaborate retrieval pathways, so you have more ways to access the material," she said.
Thomas explained that the ideas about the effectiveness of retrieval practice are not new.
"This finding, while it has been more recently applied to educationally relevant materials, has its roots in early work from the 1960s looking at a generation of fact and expanded retrieval practice. These ideas are not new, just the way that they are being applied is," she said.
Hammer applies the retrieval method in his own classes.
"The best outcome comes from exploring and investigating ideas for yourself," he said. "What I do in my physics class is a lot more of the students producing the information and coming up with their own arguments. If you want to learn physics, you have to assemble ideas for yourself."
Thomas uses this concept as a teaching tool in her classroom as well.
"Many of us who come from this theoretical perspective apply it in the classroom. I do. I give a lot of tests and pop quizzes," she said. "It's the act of taking the material away and being forced to generate it. Every time you retrieve information, it serves as another act of encoding, so you have multiple representations of one bit of information."
Thomas acknowledged that test-taking is far from an experience students enjoy, but she reiterated that the process is beneficial.
"It's for your own good. It really is," she said. "Obviously, if you haven't encoded the material, you won't perform well on the test. But if students are going into the classroom with the goal of learning, then whatever the grade the student receives shouldn't matter. Test-taking is a mechanism for learning, not a mechanism for assessment."
Although Hammer supports the results, he is not optimistic that the findings will have an impact on the way material is taught in classrooms across the United States.
"What's very hard about education is that people have yet to think of it as an area where you have new insight from research," he said. "People teach the way their gut tells them to teach … and it's very hard to change that system."
