How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

by Benedict Carey

But what if, instead, you took a test on Day 1 that was comprehensive but not a replica of the final exam? You’d bomb the thing, to be sure. You might not be able to understand a single question. And yet that experience, given what we’ve just learned about testing, might alter how you subsequently tune into the course itself during the rest of the term. This is the idea behind pretesting, the latest permutation of the testing effect. In a series of experiments, psychologists like Roediger, Karpicke, the Bjorks, and Kornell have found that, in some circumstances, unsuccessful retrieval attempts—i.e., wrong answers—aren’t merely random failures. Rather, the attempts themselves alter how we think about, and store, the information contained in the questions. On some kinds of tests, particularly multiple-choice, we learn from answering incorrectly—especially when given the correct answer soon afterward. That is, guessing wrongly increases a person’s likelihood of nailing that question, or a related one, on a later test. That’s a sketchy-sounding proposition on its face, it’s true. Bombing tests on stuff you don’t know sounds more like a recipe for discouragement and failure than an effective learning strategy. The best way to appreciate this is to try it yourself. That means taking another test.