By: Yana Weinstein

One thing that has always bothered me about the advice that students should practice retrieval is the lack of specific instructions regarding how they should go about actually doing it. It’s all well and good for us to tell our students they ought to do something – but unless the resources are there and the instructions are clear, only the most motivated and resourceful will put the advice into practice.

Imagine your daughter is studying for an exam. Having read our previous blog posts, you give your daughter the well-meaning advice: test yourself! Best-case scenario: she has plenty of practice questions similar to those she should expect to find on the actual exam. In this situation, my concerns are unwarranted and your child can proceed to the next step: practicing retrieval with those well-suited practice questions!

More often than not, however, such practice questions are conspicuously absent. Maybe there’s a multiple-choice quiz bank that goes with the textbook, but the teacher told her it wasn’t very good. What should your daughter do? Should she just re-read the textbook, or can she benefit from the testing effect by generating and answering her own questions on the material?

I decided it was important to examine what happened in this situation (1). To do this, I had undergraduate students at Washington University in St. Louis study four different passages on obscure trivia adapted from Wikipedia (in case you’re wondering, they were Salvador Dalí, the KGB, Venice, and the Taj Mahal).

The first passage was used for practice so students could get used to the format. For the remaining three passages, after reading the passage once, students then did one of the following activities with it: they either re-read the passage, answered some comprehension questions provided by the experimenter, or created their own questions and then wrote down their answers. Time was intentionally uncontrolled, so that students would take as along as they needed for each of these strategies.

After engaging in one of the strategies (re-reading the passage, answering questions, or generating and answering questions), students made a prediction of how much they would remember on a later tests. Then, a week later, students came back and took a short-answer test on the readings.

