Reading: True / False / Not Given: Question 9

For much of the twentieth century, conventional wisdom in education held that the best way to consolidate new material was to reread it repeatedly, and generations of students were advised to highlight textbooks and revisit their notes as exam dates approached. Beginning in the 1970s, however, a growing body of experimental research in cognitive psychology began to challenge this assumption, revealing a phenomenon now widely known as the testing effect: attempting to recall information from memory, even in the absence of any feedback, embeds that information far more durably than simply re-reading the same material an equivalent number of times.

In a typical experiment demonstrating this effect, one group of students studies a passage and then rereads it, while a second group studies the passage once and is then tested on it, without being told whether their answers were correct. When both groups are tested again a week later, the group that engaged in retrieval consistently outperforms the group that merely reread the material, despite having spent no additional time reviewing the original text and despite the first test producing no corrective feedback.

Researchers have also documented a related principle called the spacing effect: information reviewed in several short sessions spread over days or weeks is retained substantially better than the same total amount of study time compressed into a single lengthy session immediately before an exam. Combining retrieval practice with spaced review (for example, using flashcards to quiz oneself at gradually lengthening intervals) is now regarded by many cognitive scientists as among the most reliably effective study techniques available, more so than either technique used alone.

Despite this substantial evidence, surveys of students consistently find that rereading and highlighting remain the most commonly used study strategies, while active retrieval and spaced review are used far less often. One explanation offered for this mismatch is that rereading a familiar passage generates a comforting but misleading sense of fluency, leading students to overestimate how well they have actually learned the material, whereas the effortful struggle of retrieval, though more productive, feels less pleasant and less indicative of progress while it is happening.

Do the following statements agree with the information given in the passage? Write TRUE, FALSE or NOT GIVEN.

1. The testing effect shows that recalling information from memory helps retention more than rereading the same material the same number of times.
2. In the experiment described, students who reread the passage performed better on the later test than students who were tested on it.
3. Students who took the initial test were told immediately whether their answers were correct.
4. The spacing effect shows that spreading study sessions across several days improves retention compared with one long session.
5. Cognitive scientists agree that spaced review alone is more effective than retrieval practice alone.
6. Surveys show that most students continue to use rereading and highlighting as their primary study methods despite evidence favouring other techniques.
7. According to the passage, rereading gives students an accurate sense of how well they have learned material.
8. The testing effect was first identified by researchers studying university students specifically.