Want to know the best way to make pupils recall information? Repeated testing could be more effective than revision, says Biddy Passmore

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.

They gave 40 college students a list of 40 Swahili-English word pairs, asked them to study it for a set time, and then tested them on the list.

The 40 students were divided into four groups. One group repeatedly studied and were tested on the whole list (group 1). In the other three, once a student had correctly recognised a Swahili word and recalled its English translation, it was either: repeatedly studied but dropped from further testing (group 2), repeatedly tested but dropped from further study (group 3), or dropped from both study and test (group 4). All of these study and test periods were back-to-back, on one day.

The results? Repeated studying had no effect on the student’s ability to recall the information a week later. Those who were just tested once but carried on studying did much worse than those who stopped studying but were repeatedly tested. In fact, the “one test, repeated study” students did almost as badly as those who stopped both studying and testing.

Read more in this week's TES Magazine, out Friday April 25