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But like many chapters in this book demonstrate, the effect of retrieval practice works in the real world too; an important chunk of that real-world being the classroom.

Therefore, this chapter determines to answer two questions: should we use testing, quizzing or exam as a tool to assess how much a student has learned or we can also use testing as a learning event? Two, can testing improve students performance in online learning during a health crisis such as the season of COVID-19?

Here’s how one professor figured it out.

“In 2002, Leeming used an “exam-a-day” approach to teaching an introductory psychology course. He found that students who completed an exam every day rather than exams that covered large blocks of material scored significantly higher on a retention test administered at the end of the semester,” Brame and Biel reported in their 2015 review of retrieval practice.

Later, a 2009 study found that retrieval practise helped medical students’ performance.  ”Larsen, Butler, and Roediger asked whether a testing effect was observed for medical residents’ learning about status epilepticus and myasthenia gravis, two neurological disorders, at a didactic conference. Specifically, residents participated in an interactive teaching session on the two topics and then were randomly divided into two groups,” Brame and Biel wrote.

They were given two topics. One group studied a review sheet on the first topic (myasthenia gravis) and took a test on the second topic (status epilepticus). The other group, however, started with a test on the first topic and studied a review sheet on the second topic.

Six months later, the residents were asked to complete a test on both topics. The results show that the testing condition averaged scores that were 13% higher than the study condition.

It works in a statistics class too. Lyle and Crawford in their 2011 paper, described the effect of retrieval practice in an undergraduate statistics class. A section of the course was asked to spend the last five or 10 minutes of the class to answer about four questions to recall what they just learned from the lecture.

Another section of the course was however not subjected to this process. Results showed that there was a statistical significance between the two sections. Those who used retrieval practise during the course of the semester performed 8% higher than the other section. This may not sound much, but it was significant; meaning that the testing effect alone made a huge difference.

We see that the test-enhanced technique works in the in-person classroom, but does this translate to the online classroom setting? In the age of coronavirus where every school is going online, it would be magnificent if the benefits of retrieval practice are not lost through the cracks of the internet.

Well, it appears that research has found an answer to this question. In  2012, McDaniel, Wildman and Anderson explored the benefits of quizzing in enhancing academic performance to see if such evaluations would work outside the laboratory. using a web-based class, participants were quizzed using multiple-choice and short answer questions. Multiple attempts were allowed and immediate feedback was provided.

When exam questions were similar to the quizzes earlier answered by participants, both the multiple-choice and short answer questions improved performance in the examination over rereading the target material.

When the exam questions were related but different from the earlier quizzes, both types of quizzes benefited the students in answering unquizzed targeted material. What this means is that retrieval practice helps students answer unrelated questions too. Even though in this case, the increase in exam performance over rereading was nominal. (For an insight into how this works, read the chapter on how Muslims memorize the Qur’an.)

Based on the findings, McDaniel and colleagues concluded that indeed the testing effect extends to the classroom, saying ”these experimental results indicate that unsupervised on-line quizzing in a college course enhances exam performance, thereby representing an important extension of laboratory testing effects into the classroom setting.”

To continue reading visit https://dailytrust.com/the-wonderful-results-of-the-exam-a-day-professor