Give a leg up

So you thought testing was just assessment and either neutral or actively harmful to learning? Well, think again. New research from the US suggests that, far from being a recipe for a blighted childhood, repeated testing is one of the best ways to learn. The active retrieval of facts from the memory that occurs during testing is far more helpful for consolidating knowledge than passive studying.

The study indicates that pupils who stop revising a topic after they have correctly recalled it once are doing themselves no favours. They need to keep testing themselves and each other on the same material to make it stick.

The researchers, Jeffrey D. Karpicke of Purdue University, Indiana, and Henry L. Roediger III of Washington University in St Louis, decided to test some central assumptions about learning and memory. These are that "learning occurs while people study and encode material", that additional study should therefore increase learning, and that testing represents a neutral event that merely measures it. ...

•	Give a leg up The Times Education Supplement (London UK), Friday, April 25, 2008 Byline: Biddy Passmore