A recent Science paper shows that students who read a passage and then took a test on it recalled 50 percent more than those who either studied the material repeatedly or drew detailed “concept maps”:
The researchers engaged 200 college students in two experiments, assigning them to read several paragraphs about a scientific subject — how the digestive system works, for example, or the different types of vertebrate muscle tissue.
In the first experiment, the students were divided into four groups. One did nothing more than read the text for five minutes. Another studied the passage in four consecutive five-minute sessions.
A third group engaged in “concept mapping,” in which, with the passage in front of them, they arranged information from the passage into a kind of diagram, writing details and ideas in hand-drawn bubbles and linking the bubbles in an organized way.
The final group took a “retrieval practice” test. Without the passage in front of them, they wrote what they remembered in a free-form essay for 10 minutes. Then they reread the passage and took another retrieval practice test.
A week later all four groups were given a short-answer test that assessed their ability to recall facts and draw logical conclusions based on the facts.
The second experiment focused only on concept mapping and retrieval practice testing, with each student doing an exercise using each method. In this initial phase, researchers reported, students who made diagrams while consulting the passage included more detail than students asked to recall what they had just read in an essay.
But when they were evaluated a week later, the students in the testing group did much better than the concept mappers. They even did better when they were evaluated not with a short-answer test but with a test requiring them to draw a concept map from memory.
The abstract eschews the dowdy term regurgitation and instead refers to it as retrieval practice.
The one-factor explanation: practice. If you are going to be taking a test, practicing tests makes you better at it.
This wasn’t a case of taking a practice test before taking the real test though. The practice test arguably wasn’t a test at all; it was retrieval practice: the students wrote what they remembered in a free-form essay for 10 minutes. Also, the real test wasn’t in this form. It was a short-answer test.
Further, when the students were asked to draw a concept map, those who had done the retrieval practice drew a more thorough map than those who had practiced concept-mapping.
So I don’t think it’s a simple matter of practicing the test you’re going to take.
I’d been thinking about it since I left my comment, and my original wasn’t correct. Let’s try again.
Aretae’s theory of education says: Practice is everything, but effective practice is composed of 4 items:
Quick map of their experiment to my theory is pretty easy. Test-taking encourages feedback. Re-reading doesn’t. Concept-mapping doesn’t.
I think we largely agree, but what’s interesting in this case is that the “test” was simply writing a free-form essay for 10 minutes. So the feedback was along the lines of “Wow, I didn’t remember much to write down,” rather than “D’oh! I forgot to account for xyz!”