Summary: The Importance Of Testing In An Educational Settings

In an educational settings, tests are usually considered method of assessment. Testing is a powerful means of improving learning and not just assessing it. Students takes test to assess whatever they have learned, tests like SAT, CAT etc. Various type of tests are conducted in order to assess students knowledge. More often the students takes test in class, they will study more and will space their studying throughout the semester rather than concentrating it just before exams. Test has a powerful positive effect on future retention. In early laboratory studies, research subjects memorized lists of words. After this initial memorization period, some subjects were asked to recall as many words as they could and other subjects were given additional

Arnold and Kathleen B. McDermott in 2013. It was published in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 2013, Vol. 39. Most of this research has focused on how retrieval practice enhances later retrieval. Testing slows forgetting and therefore improves the likelihood of later retrieval .This finding, known as the testing effect, is a direct effect of retrieval because the act of retrieving an item directly enhances later memory.In addition to this direct effect, testing can also have indirect effects, or effects mediated through subsequent events. One such indirect effect of testing is the mediated effect of retrieval practice through later encoding. Attempting to retrieve items may improve later encoding of those items even when the retrieval attempt fails and feedback is not given. This effect, known as test-potentiated learning, was first identified by Izawa (1966). To examine test-potentiated learning, in multiple experiments Izawa had participants learn paired items using multi-trial cued recall paradigms. She varied the number of test trials between interspersed study trials, and found that, when considered as a function of number of preceding study trials, conditions with more interspersed test trials had steeper learning curves. She assumed that neither learning nor forgetting occurred during test trials, and therefore concluded that the tests must have potentiated learning during subsequent study trials. There were two main goals of this experiment. The first was to replicate Izawa’s (e.g., 1966, 1971) findings that more interspersed tests increase the rate of learning on subsequent restudy trials using educationally relevant stimuli .The rate of learning during restudy trials was faster in the 5-Test than in the 1-Test condition; given the same number of study trials, participants could