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Peter Kronfeld

How Tests Make Us Smarter - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...how-tests-make-us-smarter.html

testing memory math

shared by Peter Kronfeld on 19 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • used properly, testing as part of an educational routine provides an important tool not just to measure learning, but to promote it.
  • Various kinds of testing, though, when used appropriately, encourage students to practice the valuable skill of retrieving and using knowledge.
  • tests serve students best when they’re integrated into the regular business of learning and the stakes are not make-or-break, as in standardized testing.
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  • researchers have also found that the most common study strategies — like underlining, highlighting and rereading — create illusions of mastery but are largely wasted effort
  • Just as it is with the multiplication tables, so it is with complex concepts and skills: effortful, varied practice builds mastery.
Peter Kronfeld

Test-Taking Cements Knowledge Better Than Studying, Researchers Say - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...21memory.html

education learning testing

shared by Peter Kronfeld on 23 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Taking a test is not just a passive mechanism for assessing how much people know, according to new research. It actually helps people learn, and it works better than a number of other studying techniques.
  • These other methods not only are popular, the researchers reported; they also seem to give students the illusion that they know material better than they do.
  • The second experiment focused only on concept mapping and retrieval practice testing, with each student doing an exercise using each method. In this initial phase, researchers reported, students who made diagrams while consulting the passage included more detail than students asked to recall what they had just read in an essay. But when they were evaluated a week later, the students in the testing group did much better than the concept mappers. They even did better when they were evaluated not with a short-answer test but with a test requiring them to draw a concept map from memory.
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  • “Educators who embrace seemingly more active approaches, like concept mapping,” he continued, “are challenged to devise outcome measures that can demonstrate the superiority of such constructivist approaches.”
  • “More testing isn’t necessarily better,” said Dr. Linn, who said her work with California school districts had found that asking students to explain what they did in a science experiment rather than having them simply conduct the hands-on experiment — a version of retrieval practice testing — was beneficial. “Some tests are just not learning opportunities. We need a different kind of testing than we currently have.”
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