[xmca] "Testing boosts memory, study doesn't"

The text below with formatting and links is posted at
http://curricublog.org/2008/03/08/karpicke-roediger/

A study reported last month in Science is being discussed around the
blogosphere under titles like "Testing boosts memory, study doesn't," and
"Testing, not studying, makes for strong long-term memories."

I think the 2½-page published report of the study itself makes for an
excellent item to "test" students' (I'm thinking now of grad students in
education) ability to recognize the implications of the difference between
cognitivist vs. social-ontological approaches to learning.

Here's the free public authors' abstract of the article at Sciencemag.org:

     Science 15 February 2008:
     Vol. 319. no. 5865, pp. 966 - 968
     DOI: 10.1126/science.1152408
     Reports
     The Critical Importance of Retrieval for Learning

     Jeffrey D. Karpicke1* and Henry L. Roediger, III2 Learning is often
considered complete when a student can produce the correct answer to a
question. In our research, students in one condition learned foreign
language vocabulary words in the standard paradigm of repeated study-test
trials. In three other conditions, once a student had correctly produced
the vocabulary item, it was repeatedly studied but dropped from further
testing, repeatedly tested but dropped from further study, or dropped from
both study and test. Repeated studying after learning had no effect on
delayed recall, but repeated testing produced a large positive effect. In
addition, students' predictions of their performance were uncorrelated
with actual performance. The results demonstrate the critical role of
retrieval practice in consolidating learning and show that even university
students seem unaware of this fact.

     1 Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University, West
Lafayette, IN 47907, USA.
     2 Department of Psychology, Washington University in St. Louis, St.
Louis, MO 63130, USA.

     * To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail:
karpicke@purdue.edu

     Read the Full Text
=========

Tony Whitson
UD School of Education
NEWARK DE 19716

twhitson@udel.edu
_______________________________

"those who fail to reread
  are obliged to read the same story everywhere"
                   -- Roland Barthes, S/Z (1970)

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Received on Sat Mar 8 13:23 PST 2008