1Cademy - Experiment 1 Procedure: Test-Enhanced Learning

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Experiment Design: Test-Enhanced Learning

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Experiment 1 Procedure: Test-Enhanced Learning

Thirty subjects from a pool of one hundred eighty Washington University undergraduates, ranging from ages 18 to 24, were assigned to six different conditions. This study was designed to manipulate the retention interval, while examining how the mean proportion of idea units recalled respond to this learning condition.
Both passages that the subjects were required to read were composed of these 30 idea units. These idea units were used to quantify later retention tests by the proportion of the passage that students would be able to later recall. The subjects scored one point for each idea unit they recalled correctly out of thirty.
To assure inter-rater reliability, two raters scored the first twenty tests, which yielded a correlation of .95. The remaining tests were graded by one person. After reading one of the two prose passages, subjects in the SSSS condition underwent repeated study, subjects in the SSST condition underwent a single test, and subjects in the STTT condition underwent repeated tests.
Ninety subjects were given a five minute retention interval before a final recall test, and the remaining ninety subjects followed suit after one week. To establish a control across these variables, the Experiment 1 passages were used again and counterbalanced across conditions for Experiment 2.
In phase 1 of this experiment the subjects reported an average recall of the passage of approximately seventy percent. The subjects who studied twice outperformed the subjects who studied once for the five minute retention interval.
The one week and two day intervals yielded the opposite results: the tested subjects who studied once outperformed those who studied twice in the final testing phases. In Experiment 1, studying promoted the performance of students for immediate retention tests, while prior testing improved performance on delayed tests