How Practice Tests Help Students Learn - Test Innovators (2024)

FAQs

How are practice tests helpful? ›

1. Reduce anxiety: When you complete practice exams you are developing your confidence and familiarity with the tasks and therefore helping to reduce your anxiety. 2. Highlight the gaps in your knowledge: Doing practice exams will help you to determine what topics you know and what areas you need to concentrate on.

The feedback students receive from frequent testing helps them understand what concepts they might not fully understand and how they should prioritize future study habits, improving their overall learning.

Practice tests are designed to make students familiar with the exam format, types of questions, and time duration of the exam. Students who have attempted practice tests are more likely to excel in the actual exam.

Practice testing was highly effective as a learning technique for all three groups, increasing the likelihood that target information can be retrieved from long-term memory. Students learn to mentally organize information, which supports better retention and test performance.

With repeated testing or quizzing, students are more likely to keep up with the readings and lectures and ultimately master the material. This instructional principle is commonly referred to as retrieval practice or frequent testing.

For example, students read a passage or watch a lecture and then try to recall as much as they can. Or, students read an article followed by a practice quiz. Practice testing is a highly effective learning strategy (Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan & Willingham, 2013).

In essence, test-enhanced learning is the idea that the process of remembering concepts or facts—retrieving them from memory—increases long-term retention of those concepts or facts.

Why Testing Improves Recall. Some posit that testing works differently in the brain than studying. Testing asks your brain to remember information on cue: this process could perhaps organize and create connections that our brains later recognize.

It drives students and teachers away from learning, and at times from school. It narrows, distorts, weakens and impoverishes the curriculum while fostering forms of instruction that fail to engage students or support high-quality learning.

Why is testing practices important? ›

Testing can help ensure you're in compliance with any legal obligations and industry-specific standards. Save in the long run. By discovering errors early on, it will be much cheaper, faster and easier to fix than when problems are discovered later.

Practice tests allow for a pretty good simulation of the stress of the real exam while also giving students the confidence they need to perform their absolute best. The more practice tests a student takes, the more comfortable they should be with the stress.

Why does taking practice tests work? The testing effect. There is something called the “testing effect” – when you take a test under testing (or test-like) conditions, you have to retrieve information from your memory, making it easier to recall at a later time.

Professors tell us that, in STEM courses, practice questions are one of the most effective strategies to learn the material. Practice questions can help us in two ways. One, they can show us if we understand the material from lectures. Two, they can help us identify any gaps we may have.

Research in cognitive science and psychology shows that testing, done right, can be an exceptionally effective way to learn. Taking tests, as well as engaging in well-designed activities before and after tests, can produce better recall of facts—and deeper and more complex understanding—than an education without exams.

Practice questions can help us in two ways. One, they can show us if we understand the material from lectures. Two, they can help us identify any gaps we may have.