By: Cindy Wooldridge

Sometimes we are contacted by instructors or students and are asked for a prescription for how to study or how to implement the strategies successfully. We have a lot of reasons why we can’t offer a simple answer to these questions, but today I want to offer you a personal anecdote about how applying the science of learning is not always as simple as it seems.

During the fall of 2015, I was starting a new position at Washburn University. I needed to get some research up and running, so I quickly threw together an idea that had been brewing for some time. We know that retrieval practice is an effective way of promoting retention, but it’s such a pain to write high quality daily quizzes and grade them. What if, instead, the students wrote and answered their own quizzes? This method could possibly create an efficient and effective means of quizzing in the classroom.

Here’s what we did… With the help of some amazing graduate students (I’m looking at you, Eileen!), students across four of my courses received four different types of quizzing, one during each quarter of the semester.

The conditions included:

1) No quizzes (as a baseline)

2) Standard quizzes – At the end of each class, I asked a single short-answer question that required approximately 1-2 sentences to answer and covered a major concept from the day’s lesson.

3) Student-written quizzes – The students were asked to generate a single short-answer question from the day’s lesson and to provide the correct answer.

4) Traded quizzes – The students were asked to generate a single short-answer question, which was collected and given to another student to answer.

After all conditions, students were encouraged to ask questions in order to give immediate feedback.

We hypothesized that students writing their own questions would benefit from the generation of the question and that the traded conditions would have the added benefit of additional retrieval.

The result? Epic failure. Not only did the quizzing conditions do no better than the baseline, but the student-written questions actually did significantly worse. That is, by trying to implement retrieval practice in my classroom, I had actually hurt my students!