Day: September 25, 2023

In education circles, it’s popular to rail against testing, especially timed exams. Tests are stressful and not the best way to measure knowledge, wrote Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in a Sept. 20, 2023 New York Times essay. “You wouldn’t want a surgeon who rushes through a craniectomy, or an accountant who dashes through your taxes.”
It’s tempting to agree. But there’s another side to the testing story, with a lot of evidence behind it.
Cognitive scientists argue that testing improves learning. They call it “practice retrieval” or “test-enhanced learning.” In layman’s language, that means that the brain learns new information and skills by being forced to recall them periodically. Remembering consolidates information and helps the brain form long-term memories. Of course, testing is not the only way to accomplish this, but it’s easy and efficient in a classroom.
Several meta-analyses, which summarize the evidence fr..