Testing effect

The testing effect (also known as retrieval practice, active recall, practice testing, or test-enhanced learning) suggests long-term memory is increased when part of the learning period is devoted to retrieving information from memory. It is different from the more general practice effect, defined in the APA Dictionary of Psychology as "any change or improvement that results from practice or repetition of task items or activities." Cognitive psychologists are working with educators to look at how to take advantage of tests—not as an assessment tool, but as a teaching tools as testing prior knowledge is more beneficial for learning when compared to reading or passively studying material, even more so when the test is more challenging for memory. Before much experimental evidence had been collected, the utility of testing was already evident to some perceptive observers including Francis Bacon who discussed it as a learning strategy as early as 1620. "Hence if you read a piece of text through twenty times, you will not learn it by heart so easily as if you read it ten times while attempting to recite it from time to time and consulting the text when your memory fails." Towards the end of the 17th Century, John Locke made a similar observation regarding the importance of repeated retrieval for retention in his 1689 book "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding". "But concerning the ideas themselves, it is easy to remark, that those that are oftenest refreshed (amongst which are those that are conveyed into the mind by more ways than one) by a frequent return of the objects or actions that produce them, fix themselves best in the memory, and remain clearest and longest there." Towards the end of the 19th century, Harvard psychologist William James described the testing effect in the following section of his 1890 book "The Principles of Psychology" "A curious peculiarity of our memory is that things are impressed better by active than by passive repetition.