New research makes the case for hard tests, and suggests an unusual technique that anyone can use to learn
For years, many educators have championed “errorless learning,” advising teachers (and students) to create study conditions that do not permit errors. For example, a classroom teacher might drill students repeatedly on the same multiplication problem, with very little delay between the first and second presentations of the problem, ensuring that the student gets the answer correct each time.
The team found that students remembered the pairs much better when they first tried to retrieve the answer before it was shown to them. In a way this pretesting effect is counterintuitive: Studying a pair for 13 seconds produces worse recall than studying the pair for 5 seconds, if students in the latter condition spent the previous 8 seconds trying to retrieve or guess the answer. But the effect averaged about 10 percent better recall, and occurred both immediately after study and after a delay averaging 38 hours.
Tags: how to learn, learning
