The "testing" phenomenon: Not gone but nearly forgotten.

Abstract

The "testing " phenomenon refers to the finding that students who take a test on material between the time they first study and the time they take a final test remember more of the material than students who do not take an intervening test. 4 experiments examined the testing phenomenon in student's memory for brief passages and labels for parts of flowers. Experiments la and lb demonstrated the generality of the phenomenon to the methods and materials used in the current study. Experiment 2 ruled out an "amount of processing " hypothesis as a way of accounting for the testing phenomenon. The results of Experiment 3 seemed to indicate that the testing phenomenon resided in the number of complete retrieval events. Experiments 4a, 4b, and 4c focused on the completeness of retrieval events and indicated that the influence of retrieval on later memory performance was determined, at least in part, by the completeness of the initial retrieval event. Although there are numerous reasons for testing students' learning, one important factor is that tests improve students' memory for content (Modigliani & Hedges, 1987). In typical laboratory studies examining the so-called testing phenomenon,