Many Washington University students ask themselves “What did I learn?” upon opening their exam booklet and trying to recall material from several weeks of lectures. A recently published study examines “test-enhanced learning,” which, according to some experts, can help students improve their memories.

Henry Roediger, a psychology professor at the University, published a study in Science that deals with how well students retain information. According to Roediger, students will remember information better if they are tested on it than if they only study it without being tested.

“We usually think of tests as just for assessment. What we find is that the act of taking a test changes your knowledge [and] usually makes it better. Testing can have a direct enhancement on the learning process,” said Roediger.

In Roediger’s research, participants are divided into groups that either study the material or are tested without further studying. According to Roediger, the results of the study show that studying is not as effective at helping students retain new material.

“What we find is that the group that studied and took a test does better than the group that studied it twice, so taking a test is better than a repeated study,” said Roediger.

Roediger says that more frequent testing also has indirect benefits.

“It’s not uncommon just to have one or two tests and then a final exam. Since students typically study right before a test, you get several burst of concentrated studying. It makes people keep up with the course and the test can tell them what they know and what they don’t know so they can go back and restudy things they don’t know,” said Roediger.

In the study, participants from the University were tested on foreign language words and their English meanings. According to Roediger, the group that only tested repeatedly remembered 80 percent of the words and the group that studied repeatedly only remembered 30 percent.

Roediger says that there is a disconnect between students’ preferred method of study and the method that seems to yield the best results. According to Roediger, surveys of students at the University show that the most popular method is simply rereading material. Roediger says that self-testing with flash cards or other means would be more effective.

Andrew Butler, a graduate student at the University, is also studying the connection between being tested and retaining information. According to Butler, flash cards are commonly used, but students stop studying concepts once they can remember them once.

“The common practice is if you can recall it once you can drop that card out, you don’t have to keep testing yourself over and over again. The study shows that it really helps to keep practicing recalling it. Otherwise, you’re going to lose it,” said Butler.

According to Butler, the same type of study has been done with various subjects ranging from prose passages and lectures to conferences between doctors.

One of Butler’s studies involved having participants watch an art history lecture and then participate in different activities, including tests or reviews of the major points in the lecture.

“We found that taking a short-answer test after [the lecture] led to much better retention of that information relative to just restudying a lecture summary even though that summary included all the things [the participants] would be tested on later,” said Butler.

Butler says that the relationship can be applied to a wide variety of subjects.

Since many classes are too large to allow for frequent tests, students can test themselves instead. However, according to Butler, students commonly prefer to reread rather than test themselves.

“A lot of times [a text book] has key terms. Can you write a paragraph from memory about that key term? The key thing is trying to retrieve things from memory as opposed to seeing them and re-exposing yourself to them,” said Butler.

Butler also said study has been done on people’s predictions of how well they will remember something. According to Butler, people will predict that they will do better when they have studied instead of being tested, but the results of the studies contradict this view.

“There’s kind of this disconnect. This presumably is why people choose to study and restudy as opposed to testing themselves. They feel like they’ll learn better by [restudying],” said Butler.

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