Do You Remember What You Know? Towards an understanding of the cognitive processes involved in the testing effect

There is an old saying that you cannot fatten a hog by weighing it, which means that the simple act of weighing a pig every day will not increase its weight. This saying is sometimes employed by opponents of the increase of the use of tests in educational practice, because simply testing students on their knowledge will not make them any smarter. Although this is probably true, using tests to assess students’ knowledge level seems inevitable in educational practice and is not a bad thing per se. It can be used to indicate where a student stands against peers or a fixed standard after a learning phase, but it can also be used during a learning phase to guide student learning with help from feedback obtained by the results of a test. One of the propositions belonging to this dissertation therefore is: You cán fatten a pig by weighing it! This proposition is not stated to claim that students could become smarter by testing them frequently, but that students can benefit from taking tests. In particular, one insight from cognitive psychology strongly suggests that testing students on their knowledge can strengthen their memory for that knowledge. This insight is called the testing effect and is named after the empirical finding that testing students’ memory after an initial learning phase will improve performance on a subsequent memory test.

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