studied the difference between reading test questions beforehand and actually answering them

• Just looking at test questions might be helpful because it can serve as a framework to interact with the text or guide looking behaviors
• Had 3 conditions-pre-test questions, extra study time and a third condition where participants are asked to study questions
• 2 opposing predictions based on contradictory previous research-testing and question learning might have similar effects because they both involve deep processing & pretesting is better than trying to reproduce questions
• 76 undergraduate participants who were given extra credits
• For each participant, half of the key concepts are italicized (instead of the whole sentence so that it’s more precise)
• All questions were rewritten from previous experiments to be in fill-in-the-blank format
• In the memorizing questions condition, they were told to memorize because they would be testing someone else later on-they then were asked to write down the question before reading the passage
• In the pre-test condition, participants answered 6% of the questions correctly
• The pre-test condition did better than the other two conditions and the question memorizing condition did better than the extra study condition
• The largest difference in performance was between the pre-test condition and the extra study condition
• This study shows that attempting to answer a question is better than simply reading it