The experimental procedure is summarized in Table 1. (2008), p.872, speculate that any positive effects of closed-book tests may be even more powerful in a repeated testing design such that repeated closed-book tests with feedback may result in better long-term retention than repeated open-book tests.
Adesope O. O., Trevisan D. A., Sundararajan N. (2017). All 59 students agreed to participate in the study and signed a written consent form, which also included the permission to utilize their data (made anonymous) in a scientific publication.
The critical manipulation concerned the final 10min of seven lessons in each group. Rummer R., Schweppe J., Frstenberg A., Scheiter K., Zindler A. The ANOVA revealed a significant main effect for practice test type [F(1,44)=5.15, p=0.028, p2=0.11] whereas the main effect for final test question type and the interaction did not reach significance (both Fs<1). Examining the testing effect with open-and closed-book tests. (2003). (2008) might be responsible for the different findings. To control for differences in general ability, we also analyzed the effect of practice test type on performance for the related questions including performance on the unrelated questions as a covariate. The surprise quiz included all 16 practice questions and was the same for both groups. RR, JS, and AS analyzed the data.
Here, participants who practiced with summarization questions showed a closed-book advantage for all question types in the final test, while the open-book advantage for practicing with inference questions was restricted to the inference questions and the transfer questions. (2017). 3As stated above, the final module exam data could not be related to the surprise quiz data because participants did not provide their codes for the exam (which would have compromised anonymity).
Half the participants (open-book group) were allowed to use their notes and the course materials, which had been distributed at the beginning of each class; the other half was not allowed to use these materials (closed-book group). At the final module exam, which took place 8weeks after the surprise quiz, 51 participants showed up (25 from the open-book group and 26 from the closed-book group)1. National Library of Medicine As the closed-book advantage showed up in the exam data as well, we assume that it cannot solely be attributed to the different attendance rates for the surprise quizat least when considering both dependent variables in combination. Using tests to enhance 8th grade students retention of US history facts, The origin of the interaction between learning method and delay in the testing effect: the roles of processing and conceptual retrieval organization, Self-testing promotes superior retention of anatomy and physiology information. All the participants were undergraduate students of psychology in their first semester. During the last years, this finding, which also has been termed retrieval practice effect or quizzing effect, received growing attention and became one of the most investigated empirical phenomena in (applied) cognitive psychology (for comprehensive overviews cf. Another indirect effect of the closed-book test concerns the preparation and repetition of the learning matter at home. The Therefore, we could not relate the data collected in the module exam to the data collected in the surprise quiz. A surprise test conducted in the eighth week demonstrated better results for the closed-book group. Even though students had the opportunity to study for the exam and had taken practice tests along the way, performance was (numerically) worse for these questions than for the unrelated questions which had not been practiced in the seminars (58 and 63%).
McDaniel M. A., Agarwal P. K., Huelser B. J., McDermott K. B., Roediger H. L., III. This study was carried out in accordance with the recommendation of the ethics committee of the Faculty of Educational Sciences of the University of Erfurt with written informed consent from the subjects in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.
Careers, Edited by: Meryem Yilmaz Soylu, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, United States, Reviewed by: Yvonne Rogalski, Ithaca College, United States; Maria Luisa Lorusso, Eugenio Medea (IRCCS), Italy, This article was submitted to Educational Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology. FOIA As suggested above, this final test delay might be too short to detect an effect of retrieval practice compared to a strong control condition (see also Rummer etal., 2017). Assuming that there is a reliable closed-book advantage in the present study despite its limitations, this can be interpreted as a retrieval practice effect because the practice tests only differed in the degree to which retrieval from long-term memory was required to answer the questions. The findings of these experiments sometimes demonstrate no testing effect or even a moderate learning advantage for rereading over testing in the immediate final test condition (5min after the learning phase) but a strong and robust advantage for the testing condition for those participants tested after 1week (e.g., Wheeler etal., 2003; Roediger and Karpicke, 2006; Toppino and Cohen, 2009; Bouwmeester and Verkoeijen, 2011; Congleton and Rajaram, 2012; Rummer etal., 2017). HHS Vulnerability Disclosure, Help Also in the module exam in which different, but related questions had to be answered, a closed-book advantage was found. Students could opt out of having their data used for research at any time. This might have contributed to the overall difference between the question types. (2012) field experiment in which open-book and closed-book tests in a university course did not affect performance in a later test might speak against this interpretation. Cheat sheet or open-book? In addition, eight of the 59 students missed the exam due to illness. We calculated the proportion of achieved points in the surprise quiz per group. sharing sensitive information, make sure youre on a federal Nonetheless, the module exam data should be taken with a pinch of salt. In addition, we examined performance on the multiple choice questions of the official final module exam, which took place 8weeks after the surprise quiz. Further 6weeks later, the final module exam took place. Specifically, the exam included 9 multiple choice items which referred to subject matter also covered during the 7 experimental lessons of the seminar and 21 multiple choice questions which referred to other subject matter (i.e., topics that were either part of the seminar lessons after the experimental lessons or that were solely covered in the lecture). They were informed that the two seminars were part of a research project investigating students learning behavior. Many (laboratory) studies concerned with the testing effect follow a typical procedure: First, participants are presented with the learning material, regularly a brief science text. In sum, these studies on open-book versus closed-book testing do not support the assumption that the explicit retrieval demand in closed-book tests results in better performance compared to open-book tests, which can be taken without retrieving information from memory. (2018). Roediger H. L., III, Karpicke J. D. (2006).
This issue should be addressed in future studies either by having students write a learning diary orpreferablyby providing the learning materials online and logging the learning times. Even with respect to these questions, the closed-book group performed better than the open-book group. Rethinking the use of tests: a meta-analysis of practice testing. Rowland, 2014; Adesope etal., 2017).
Testing is also assumed to have indirect effects on future learning behavior because it provides diagnostic information on the current state of learning.
These questions could also concern the practice test questions2. Here, students received between two and three short-answer questions on a sheet of paper that addressed central aspects of the papers that had been covered in the current lesson (16 questions in total). In the introduction of this paper, we stated that comparing learning performance of closed-book practice tests with open-book practice tests is the strongest test for the retrieval practice hypothesis.
Learn more The lessons in which the practice tests (open-book tests versus closed-book test) were presented are highlighted using bold font; those lessons in which the two dependent measures took place (surprise quiz and final module exam) are set in italics. Students in the closed-book group may have asked both more and more concrete questions than the students in the open-book condition because they had no opportunity to consult the materials when answering the questions. Subsequently, the third author (AS) attributed these data (based on the students names) to one of the two experimental conditions. 8600 Rockville Pike None of the participants received direct feedback regarding test performance but all of them kept the learning materials and were encouraged to restudy the materials at home.
Nonetheless, slight differences in teaching cannot be excluded, which may have benefited the closed-book group for which an advantage had been predicted. One week after the last practice test, a closed-book surprise quiz took place, of which students were not informed beforehand and which was introduced as a practice quiz for the final module exam.
The experiment took place during 8weeks of two parallel introductory seminars in cognitive psychology at the University of Erfurt (title: Cognition) taught by the third author, with one course serving as the experimental group (closed-book tests) and the other as the control group (open-book tests). Gist trace processing to explain the testing effect. Their participants read expository texts and then either answered summarization or inference questions, either with or without the opportunity to reinspect the text. Batsell W. R., Jr., Perry J. L., Hanley E., Hostetter A. Performance in a final module exam, which took place 8weeks after the surprise quiz and included a number of questions addressing the learning matter taught in the seven critical seminar lessons, served as an additional dependent variable.
Learners can use this information to adapt subsequent learning activities, for instance, by investing more time and/or effort because of failed retrieval or by applying more elaborative encoding strategies (Fernandez and Jamet, 2017). The study by Gharib etal. Camerer C. F., Dreber A., Holzmeister F., Ho T.-H., Huber J., Johannesson M., et al. A number of questions in this exam concerned the learning matters instructed during the critical seven lessons. The testing effect is one of the most prominent instances of difficulties during learning, being desirable for long-term learning (Bjork, 1994; Roediger and Karpicke, 2006). The testing effect was not solely investigated in lab studies but also in schools (e.g., Carpenter etal., 2009; McDaniel etal., 2011; Roediger etal., 2011) and universities (e.g., Lyle and Crawford, 2011; Batsell etal., 2017). Therefore, it is plausible that the advantage for the closed-book condition over the open-book condition is (at least partly) due to longer and/or more intensive repetition of the learning matters at home.
For the question of a retrieval practice effect, students performance in a surprise retention quiz 2weeks after the exams constituted the critical dependent variable. Schwieren etal., 2017). The proportion of correct answers was higher for students in the closed-book group (M=61.11%, SD=13.05) than for students in the open-book group (M=48%, SD=17.19; t(49)=3.08, p=0.003, d=0.86).
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(1978). This is particularly the case for field experiments, in which often even a no restudy control condition is used (cf. In this setting, it is not very probable that the students relearned the materials following the course exam, passing which was their main purpose.
Lyle and Crawford (2011) compared two sections of an undergraduate course on statistics for psychology in consecutive years taught by the same instructor. This conclusion is further supported by a meta-analysis on the testing effect in psychology classrooms (Schwieren etal., 2017), which also revealed a medium-sized effect. From a retrieval practice perspective, the lack of such a closed-book advantage effect is surprising. 2). Department of Psychology, University of Kassel, Kassel, Germany, 2
Before They compared reading assignments and reading assignments plus quizzes on textbook chapters that were otherwise not covered in class. The learning phase is followed by the final test, often contrasting an immediate test (usually after 5min) with a delayed one (usually after 1week).
For instance, Batsell etal. Thus, the finding that participants learning with a closed-book practice test outperformed those learning with an open-book practice test seems to support the theoretically highly relevant assumption that the testing effect is due to retrieval practice. B.
The final test, which took place 1week later, did not reveal any systematic differences between open-book tests and closed-book tests with feedback. Here, students are allowed to consult their notes or textbooks while taking the (practice) test. Students could have benefited from retrieval practice either because memory traces were strengthened by elaborating the encoded information and by creating different retrieval routes to the information in long-term memory (e.g., Carpenter and DeLosh, 2006; Carpenter, 2009) or because practicing retrieval during learning constituted transfer-appropriate processing (e.g., Morris etal., 1977; Bjork, 1988; Roediger and Karpicke, 2006). PMC legacy view will also be available for a limited time.
To our knowledge, all previous studies contrasting open-book and closed-book tests have applied only a single testing phase with a single text. Gharib A., Phillips W., Mathew N. (2012). This, however, raises the question why we found a retrieval practice effect but other researchers did not (Agarwal etal., 2008; Agarwal and Roediger, 2011). More than a century ago, first studies have demonstrated that active retrieval of previously studied information is a more useful strategy to prevent forgetting than passive restudying (e.g., Witasek, 1907; Abott, 1909; Khn, 1914; Gates, 1917). Remarkably, though, these beneficial effects did not always show up at the typical final test delay of 1week, but only after a 2weeks delay (Rummer etal., 2017, Exp. However, there are a few laboratory studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of testing even over more elaborative control conditions such as concept mapping (Karpicke and Blunt, 2011; Blunt and Karpicke, 2014; for a replication of this finding cf. False memory propensity in people reporting recovered memories of past lives, Cognitive principles of multimedia learning: the role of modality and contiguity. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. government site. We will further report performance on the 21 unrelated exam questions. about navigating our updated article layout. One reason for the lack of a consistent effect might be the combination of an elaborative control condition and a (rather) short retention interval. At the beginning of each lesson, students had the opportunity to ask questions concerning the previous lesson, including the practice questions.
Carpenter S. K., Pashler H., Cepeda N. J.
The first and the last lessons of the experiment covered one psychological journal paper each, the remaining five lessons covered two papers each (see Table 1).