Changing the narrative on testing

When was the last time you forgot something? If you're anything like me, it's a daily occurrence. I forget someone's name pretty much as soon as they tell it to me. I go to the supermarket for four things and can only recall three. I have no idea what my password is for a new account I set up a month ago. I forget to pack something important for a work trip or holiday. I forget what programme I've seen an actor or actress in. 

Forgetting is a normal part of our everyday lives. Our brains only store the information that is needed, and it disregards what is not essential. However, forgetting can be frustrating, and at times, embarrassing! For example, asking someone's name after you've met them repeatedly, and they clearly know yours! How can we avoid forgetting when we think the information is important? If you want to remember something in a week? A month? 

If you had asked me this question when I was an undergraduate student, I'd have said make notes, highlight them, keep reading over them until it sticks. Then, when you are sure you know it, test yourself to check. But, as with many learners, my approach was backwards. Testing is one of the first things we should be doing when we are trying to commit information to memory. 

A century of cognitive research has shown that when it comes to retaining the information for longer – a couple of days, a week, a month – testing yourself on that information is more effective than trying to cram it (Yang et al., 2021). That is, you need to focus on trying to get information out of your head rather than focusing on getting information in. 

This may seem counterintuitive. As someone who was a firm believer in colour coding, re-reading and highlighting my notes, it was a surprise to me too! But there is a reason we are keen to learn using strategies that focus on getting information into our heads. It's because it increases our familiarity with the material. We become confident we know it. We think we learn more this way (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006). And in the short-term, we do. If you ask someone to remember what they just read, they'll be able to tell you quite a lot. But if you left it and asked them in a week what they remember, they'll hardly be able to retrieve anything. Forgetting happens very rapidly when we only focus on getting information into our heads.

So, while we may feel confident that we know the information that we have just come across, that confidence is misplaced. This probably feeds in to our frustration when we can't recall it at a later point. I was sure I knew that! Why can't I remember it now?! I hope to convince you that testing yourself, or retrieving that information, is a key part of the learning process. 

The power of retrieval

If we don't practice retrieval, we can quickly forget information. However, if we retrieve regularly, that information can linger in our memory for a very long time, and can be fairly easily accessed in the future. For example, when I hear a song that I haven't heard for years, I can still know all the words (and dance moves!). This can be the case for songs you sang along to as a teenager, and nursery rhymes that you haven't accessed since you were very young. 

Why is this? Well, every time you sang those songs on repeat as a child or teenager, you were retrieving that information. The melody. The lyrics. You were, in effect, testing yourself on it. Each retrieval of that information was strengthening the memory of it – making it easier for your brain to access it in the future. Music also has a range of cues that can aid retrieval (the previous lyric can help you remember the next lyric, the chord change can signify a bridge or a key change). However, the reason that I can be transported back to my childhood bedroom, with all the teenage angst that came along with it, is more specifically to do with evidence demonstrating that music is a useful tool for retrieval, allowing our memories to be more specific, vivid and emotional (Loveday et al., 2020) – particularly if the song has some personal significance (Rathbone et al., 2017). 

As an aside, I think this is one of the reasons why music is so powerful at bringing people together. Many songs in the public conscious have lyrics that you can sing/scream/hum along to. How many people have connected by collectively singing at a Taylor Swift or Foo Fighters concert over summer? Everyone is retrieving the same information at exactly the same time, albeit for their own individual reasons. As Dave Grohl, frontman of the Foo Fighters said, 'you can sing a song to 85,000 people and they'll sing it back for 85,000 different reasons'. In how many other settings does that occur? 

The trouble with memory

So, testing – also known as retrieval – is important. But what exactly is retrieval and how does it fit with the rest of the learning process? Let me take you back to the basics. 

There are essentially three stages to memory – encoding, storage, and retrieval (Tulving & Thomson, 1973). Encoding is the part of learning where we are getting information into our heads. Someone tells you their name, you listen to a teacher explaining a concept, you read an interesting article. This information is then stored in your brain. In storage, however, memory decays (a morbid way of saying it is forgotten). Hopefully before you forget the information though, you can retrieve it – pull that information back out of your head. This could mean later repeating back to the person you met what their name is, writing down what your teacher told you during the lesson, or telling a friend about the interesting article you just read. 

The research clearly shows that retrieving will help you to learn more and forget that information much more slowly than if you were just focusing on encoding it (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006). But obviously, as highlighted earlier, retrieval is not always successful. Sometimes this information is completely gone, and you are unable to retrieve it at all. Other times, you feel like you know it but just can't bring the word to mind. You may be able to retrieve the first letter, an associated word or, if you're multilingual, the word in another language! This frustrating phenomenon is called 'tip-of-the-tongue', and is related to the familiarity of the word and retrieval of partial and/or related information (Schwartz & Pournaghdali, 2021). Tip-of-the-tongue often means the information is stored somewhere, but it is difficult to access. However, we know that the more you retrieve something from memory, the easier it becomes. It's a way of telling your brain 'this information is important and I need it!' Unfortunately, knowing the entire rap from the Fresh Prince of Bel Air is not really that useful… but I've retrieved it so many times I'm stuck with it!

Types of testing / retrieval

Within an educational setting, testing – or retrieval – is quite easy to set up. You can answer quiz questions, write notes up from memory, work with a friend. Outside of education, in everyday life, it may not seem so simple. I'm not going to recommend setting up a bunch of multiple-choice questions for yourself. But there are lots of ways you can bring information out of your head, some of which I have already touched upon, and you will be doing a lot anyway without even realising. 

For example, conversation is a really great way to retrieve information – telling a friend about the nightmare morning you have had. Any way that gets the information out of your head counts as successful retrieval. If it's something that's not really worthy of conversation, you can write it down on a blank piece of paper, type it up in the notes section on your device, or make a list. Any way of getting the information out that doesn't rely on external information is known as free recall. Basically, you are trying to remember something without any specific cues to guide you.

Alternatively, you can use a cue to help retrieval – something that reminds you of the information you want to retrieve. This is known as cued recall. For example, if the person you meet has their initial on a piece of jewellery, you could use that letter as a cue to retrieve their name. Another example might be logging in to a website. The website itself can act as a cue; the logo, the colours, the font can all help to guide retrieval. Or you can generate your own cue (Wheeler & Gabbert, 2017). However, a cue is not essential to retrieve. It is just one way to support retrieval. 

How you retrieve the information is not as important as doing the actual retrieval itself. Doing the retrieval once will help memory. But if you really want the memory to persist, try to retrieve repeatedly over varying time periods, say immediately, then after a minute, then after 10 minutes. Repeating to yourself a code (e.g. 1642) will keep that in mind, but this is not strictly retrieval because it's there in your mind already. So as soon as you stop repeating it, you will start to forget it. Bring it back to mind a couple of minutes later. Then an hour later. And so on. Retrieve repeatedly. 

While some information you have forgotten may be quickly and readily accessible through an online search, if you want to commit the information to memory, try to avoid Googling the answer for as long as you possibly can. Try to retrieve as much related information, or at least a guess, before looking to your device for an answer. If you Google something immediately, it falsely raises your confidence that you know the information. However, because you haven't actively retrieved it, you will be unlikely to remember it the next time you need it (Ward, 2021). If you at least have a go, have a guess, then you can use a search to correct yourself.

Making mistakes

I have just raised the possibility of making mistakes during retrieval; a factor that concerns people when using this learning strategy. This is likely due to how we view errors at a cultural level, but additionally people may have concerns that the error may persist in memory and compete with the correct answer. However, there is increasing evidence that errors are actually really beneficial for learning, as long as you know you made an error (Kornell et al., 2017; Metcalfe, 2017). Usually, if you get a name wrong, someone will correct you – you can then use this feedback to remember better next time. If you are trying to remember the code you just set, have a go at retrieving it, then check back and see if you got it right. In fact, making errors during the learning process can be better for learning than not making any errors at all (Kapur & Bielaczyc, 2012; Potts & Shanks, 2006). This idea dates all the way back to early psychologists' work exploring trial-and-error learning in animals (Morgan, 1984; Thorndike, 1911). In my opinion, avoiding errors means avoiding learning. 

We are constantly making mistakes and being corrected, and this learning is critical over a lifetime. For example, a child might say 'I goed running', and an adult might respond "oh yes, I saw you went running!". Making mistakes leads to what is known as negative knowledge – that is, knowledge about what is incorrect and what not to do in future (Ger & Roebers, 2024). The child will eventually learn that the past tense of 'go' is 'went', and will continue to learn about the complexities of the English language for… well, the rest of their lives! More broadly, the accumulation of this negative knowledge can help in work situations, social situations, and so on (Gartmeier et al., 2008). For example, learning what is appropriate and inappropriate conduct in a shared office, or learning how to work with different team members. 

However, despite all this knowledge in the cognitive psychology literature about how great errors are, this doesn't translate to what people do in practice. People are hesitant to make mistakes (Pan et al., 2020), and also quite bad at identifying how well they will learn from making mistakes (Huelser & Metcalfe, 2012). This aligns with what people think about testing – that testing themselves won't improve their memory. We are pretty bad at knowing intuitively what is good for our memory.

Reframing testing as a learning strategy

So here lies a problem. We know that this strategy works, but our metacognition about it is poor. I think there are a few reasons that we struggle to see testing ourselves as a strategy for learning. In schools, colleges, universities, and other educational settings, testing is used to assess what you know. It is the end point of the learning journey, and mistakes are bad. Testing is what you do once you already know the information. If you get things wrong, you don't do as well, and this has implications for your life trajectory. 

However, we need to change the narrative on testing. It is clear that testing is part of the learning process, not the end product. It is something we should be doing for any new information we want to commit to memory in the long term. Instead of being focused on performance – how well you are doing at something – testing should be seen as learning. It's an opportunity to improve your memory of that new information.

There are ways to test that don't feel like testing. Many education settings use retrieval practice, rather than formal tests. This can involve asking students to write down everything they remember, or to talk with a friend about their knowledge. This is great for learning, especially if it is done regularly and feedback is provided. It is also an opportunity to teach students that making errors is good, and key for learning. Making mistakes is normal, and it is part of your growth as a learner, and as a person more broadly. 

Take home message

Our memories will never be perfect, but testing yourself is one way you can improve how long you remember that information for. I'm not saying you'll never forget a name, a date, a password, or your shopping ever again. Failures of retrieval will always happen. But to give yourself a better shot at remembering, start testing yourself. Testing is not the end product of learning; it is a core part of learning. Now, go and retrieve what you have learnt from this article! 

Dr Katy Burgess is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychology at Cardiff University

Key sources

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