How people learn to program8 min read

Test-Enhanced Learning: Taking Memory Tests Improves Long-Term Retention

Henry L. Roediger III, Jeffrey D. Karpicke · 2006 · Psychological Science 17(3), 249–255

Being tested on material beats re-reading it — dramatically — once you look a week out instead of five minutes.

Read the paper ↗doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01693.x ↗

The short version

→Students who read a passage once and were then tested on it remembered more a week later than students who read it twice.
→The re-readers felt more confident and did better after five minutes; the advantage flipped by two days and widened by a week.
→The test worked even without feedback — the act of retrieving is itself a learning event, not just a measurement.
→Saasworld's mid-lesson gates and the daily drill exist because of this line of work.

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