Testing huh, what is it good for?

Danielle Myburgh's recent post on the utility of examinations, made me wonder if their is any use for examinations in this age of education. Danielle posed many questions in her why style. 

Danielle is skeptical towards the effectiveness of examinations. However, their is evidence to suggest that exams enhance learning in a way that studying topics alone cannot. My students moan about my chemistry class. Every Friday, I require students to take a test. Every single Friday. With so much riding on test results for both teachers and students, the external examinations required by the Cambridge system my school employs appears to encourage more cheating than learning. At best, they foster memorization, but at the expense of originality and critical thinking. The dreaded teaching to the test. Today, information can be more easily—and accurately— searched online than mentally recalled, old-fashioned testing strikes its critics as obsolete. But it turns out that the right kinds of assessments—frequent, short tests—can actually yield big educational benefits. It’s called the “testing effect,” and it is my belief that educators are missing an opportunity by not doing more to take advantage of it.

One of the major problems with the standardized testing is that it is built on the assumption that there’s a fixed amount of knowledge and ability in a student’s head, which the test merely measures. But that’s not what research has shown. Done properly, testing is not impotent. Rather, it can be much more like Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. The act of testing students, actually affects how much knowledge they retain, how well they retain it and how they apply it.

The research documenting the testing effect goes back nearly 100 years. In one experiment, three groups of high school students were given reading passages to study. The first group went over the material once. The second group studied it twice. The third group was given an initial test on what they’d read. Two weeks later, the students in all three groups were brought back and given an identical assessment. While the group that studied the passages a second time scored better than the group that just studied them once, the students who were initially tested performed best. The results held up when the students sat for follow-ups five months later. The testing had enhanced learning and retention more than just studying without examination.

Andrew Butler went further, showing that testing facilitates creative problem solving, a major objection against testing. Undergraduates were given six text passages filled with facts and concepts. (Fact: There are approximately 1,000 species of bats. Concept: how bats’ echolocation works.) He had the students just study some of the passages; others, he repeatedly tested them on. Not only did these latter students demonstrate a better grasp of the tested material, but they also fared better when asked apply these concepts in completely new contexts— answering questions about airplane wings. When students had been tested on the passages, rather than just reading them, they got about 50 percent more of the answers correct. They were better at drawing inferences, thanks to the testing effect.

The key to this effect is the timing. The sooner students are tested after encountering new material, the more it sinks in, the longer you wait to test students the more substantial the reduction of their performances. On the other hand, the more testing a student gets on a given set of more information, the greater the benefits. With the first few tests, students show dramatic gains. With further testing, the positive effects on retention taper off. But surprisingly, there is no plateau. Even after 20 or 30 tests, students’ performances progressively improve with each additional test.

No one is entirely sure what causes the effect. The most plausible explanation is that connections between neural cells increase when you reinforce the learning with examinations. When you fail to engage them, they seem to wither away; brain power is a classic case of “use it or lose it.” Because the recall process involved in test-taking requires real mental effort, it bulks up the brain’s neural connections and may force the brain to create multiple, alternative retrieval routes for accessing the same piece of information. Frequent mental struggle strengthens intellectual wiring. This may be why, for all the drawbacks of external examination courses featuring lots of practice exams, they can boost vocabulary and math skills—by forcing students to retrieve the information on all those flash cards, they provide helpful mental workouts. So although it has it's critics, evidence suggests that examinations and tests still hold an important place in the modern educational system.