By: Yana Weinstein

This post is the second in a series where we delve into the nuances involved in retrieval practice. The first can be found here: I’m a Teacher Who Loves Quizzing: But Does Quiz Format Matter?

When I first started teaching at UMass Lowell 3 years ago, I didn’t know much about teaching. One thing I did know, though, was that my lectures were going to involve a lot of quizzing. I started off with two sections of Cognitive Psychology, which I taught in a fairly traditional lecture style, except that I always included a demonstration of an experiment in each lecture. I then faced a choice: should I put the quiz questions at the end of the lecture, or throughout? From what I knew of the literature, the choice wasn’t obvious.

On the one hand, most of the research on implementing quizzing in the classroom with positive results had focused on quizzes that were given after the lecture (1). Anecdotally, I also heard from colleagues in my field that this is what they did in their own classes.

On the other hand, I had recently done a study on face-name learning where quizzes were interspersed throughout learning (2). The results of this research strongly suggest that interspersing quizzes throughout learning helps not only learning of the face-name pairs that are tested, but also the learning of NEW face-name pairs that come later in the same learning session! One of the reasons for this could be that participants who are tested consistently throughout learning come to expect to be tested (3), and so pay closer attention to the material.

But at the same time, having students do the quiz at the end of the lecture could be more beneficial to later learning, because it would require more effortful retrieval, which helps learning (4). You can see how it was hard for me to pick the ideal place to quiz! I immediately saw the opportunity to turn this into an empirical question (5).

The following semester, I picked 8 lectures and varied whether quiz questions were presented throughout the lecture or at the end of the lecture. Because I had two sections of the same class, I was able to counterbalance question placement so that if on any given day students in one section answered quiz questions throughout, the other sections had them at the end.

Here is what my PowerPoint slide sorter looked like when quiz questions (red slides) were interspersed, compared with at the end: