From Cognitive Daily’s “Does test-taking help students learn?”

Practice tests need not duplicate the format of the final test. Instead, practice tests should require as much effort as possible from the test taker. If the goal is long-term retention, final tests should also be in a free-recall format rather than, say, choosing from a list of possible answers.

If this is true, and holds up under long-term studies, then it’s another powerful argument against the typical multiple-choice standardized test.

Of course, memorizing lists of words is about as far from “learning” as you can get and still be on the same continent.  Interesting study nonetheless.

Related posts (auto-generated):

1. A Positive Stance While I disagree with the way NCLB has been conceived and enforced, I agree with this approach from teachers to students: We decided it was...
2. Freakonomics Quorum on Testing The Freakonomics Blog (hosted by the New York Times) held a quorum on standardized testing and posted the contributions yesterday. The questions were: Should there...
3. Testing Teachers From the CNN article "Commission urges tracking of teacher progress," notes about a "special commission" involved in the revision of NCLB: Teachers should be evaluated...
4. NCLB Making Progress? A recent report from the Center on Education Policy suggests that students are improving on state reading and math tests. More than that: the achievement...
5. Response to “In Defense of NCLB” I found Dan Meyer's blog post "In Defense of NCLB" through Chris Lehmann's post "A Smarter Mind than Mine Takes on NCLB." I wasn't planning...

| Print This