Testing to Help Learning?
We often think of assessments as an end-point evaluation tool, where we see what students have already learned – and how well.

However, assessments can actually be a teaching tool, too. Research shows that frequent testing of material increases students’ retention, particularly if later tests are similar in structure to the practice tests (Karpicke & Roediger, 2007).
Why? It may be because the repeated practice of having to retrieve information strengthens that retrieval ability and solidifies the learning. Thus, learning is not just about appropriately putting information into one’s memory, but also about figuring out (and practicing) how to get it out .

Examples of Implications for the Classroom:
Offer regular, short quizzes in D2L that mirror the format of any final assessments for your class.
  • Begin or end your class with a brief quiz that reviews information from previous classes.

  • Embed quizzing (especially of the sort you are likely to use in final assessments) within the structure of your class session. Make sure you are not just asking questions about current material, but more importantly about past course material. There should be a level of retrieval challenge involved!

  • For questions that students seem to struggle remembering the answers to, keep asking them in subsequent quizzes.

  • If your assessments are more likely to be long-answer, analysis-type questions, then pose these with regularity using a one-minute paper format (or an online parallel). For example, ask students to make connections from the new course material to previous course material.
Gholami, V., & Maghaddam, M. M. (2013). Effect of weekly quizzes on students’ final achievement score. I. J. Modern Education and Computer Science, 1, 36-41. doi: 10.5815/ijmecs.2013.01.05

Karpicke, J. D., & Roediger, III, H. L. (2007). Repeated retrieval during learning is the key to long-term retention. Journal of Memory and Language, 57, 151-162. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2006.09.004