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Educació

Old school: Tests help you learn

Catalonia is considering bringing back the option of letting students repeat final exams they previously failed at the end of summer. New research shows that the effectiveness of tests goes beyond the “second chance” effect: they, in fact, help you learn. Preparing for and taking an exam is a dynamic process that actually helps students to assimilate concepts

GONZALO CASINO | February 10th, 2011

Understanding the process of learning is almost as complicated as understanding the brain itself – a biological machine refined over millions of years to learn and apply acquired knowledge to the individual’s survival. The learning process is too complex for science to tackle in its entirety, and must be broken into different areas before it can be successfully analyzed and understood; there is a notable difference between learning a motor skill, such as riding a bike, and learning an abstract concept.

The dictionary makes a distinction between learning by experience and through study. Learning a trade requires a sophisticated blend of manual skills and other more intangible ones, and is a process which takes years of experience. To produce a master carpenter or other craftsman 10,000 hours of experience are needed, explained sociologist Richard Sennett in his book The Craftsman. But how many hours does it take to become a doctor? And to what extent is this learning process based on experience and on study?

If we focus on academic learning, what is the most effective study method? This question interests neuroscientists as much as educators and students because, first, the answer would help in understanding how the brain works and, second , it would have an enormous practical impact on designing more effective educational practices.

Cramming and flash cards

Educational systems have taken many turns. Supported by various pedagogical theories, there are those which have made memory their watchword, while others have fled from rote learning like the plague. Between reading a text over and over again and making flash cards and outlines as study strategies, there is a third way that emphasizes the value of self-assessment to reinforce learning.

Numerous studies are showing that tests are not simply a passive method of assessing students’ knowledge, but rather a dynamic process that actually helps them learn. A scientific paper published in the January 20, 2011 online edition of Science magazine makes the claim that doing self- assessment tests while studying is a much more effective way of learning than simply reading a text multiple times or making outlines and taking notes.

Self-assessment exercises are a more effective method of studying than rereading or making conceptual outlinesThe authors of the study, from Purdue University in the U.S., conducted the first experiment with 80 students, divided into four groups, each of which studied a scientific text using different strategies. The first group studied the text in a single session; the second group studied it in four consecutive sessions; the third group studied it during one session and then developed a conceptual outline of the text; and the fourth group put into writing what they remembered after studying the text, and then repeated the process of reading the text again and writing down what they had remembered.

The total time spent by the students in groups three and four was exactly the same. After the study phase, all students were asked to make an early assessment of the effectiveness of their group’s method before taking a test on the text.

False confidence

A week later, the students were given a short answer test on the text. Contrary to what some students had anticipated, the most successful students were the ones from group four who had done self-assessment exercises while they studied. These faired 50% better than those who made outlines, whose score was not significantly better than those who just crammed the text by rereading it. And even more surprising, the confidence levels of the students in their respective methods were completely off.

In a second experiment with 120 students, the researchers further analyzed the differences between study aided by self-assessment and by conceptual outlines. All the participants studied one text with the self-assessment method and another text by drawing conceptual outlines, and a week later half of them took a short answer test while the other half took a test that consisted in the development of a conceptual outline. The result: the self-evaluation method proved to be more effective not only in the short-answer test but also in developing a conceptual outline.

More research is needed to properly interpret and contextualize the scope of these findings. But this study clearly points in one direction: self-assessment exercises during study seem to be a more effective method for learning complex theoretical concepts. If confirmed, educators should take note.

WHAT IS LEARNING?
Learning seems to be the result of the brain coding knowledge and experience. Whatever the nature of this code may be, which is still far from being understood by science, it seems clear that any exercise that promotes this encoding process is an important aid to learning. What has perhaps not been adequately appreciated is that the exercise of remembering. For example, taking a test is not a passive mechanism for the recovery of information stored in a neutral memory, but rather a dynamic process that strengthens the brain’s encoding process.

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