What would it be like to get into a car with someone who had never driven before and ask them to take a test.

They might of course have some prior knowledge, perhaps having seen others drive but there has been no formal driving instruction. You have to admit in principle it doesn’t seem a very good idea.

Just to be clear, the test would be similar to the one they will take after the instruction and include reversing, parallel parking, emergency stop etc. 

The idea of testing before learning is hugely counterintuitive and it won’t work or be desirable in every situation, driving a car is a good example, but read the rest of this blog and you might just change your mind.  

The pretesting effect
But first, Pretesting, this involves assessing learners on information related to upcoming material before any formal instruction. There is good reason for this from a learning perspective, the pretesting identifies the baseline level of knowledge of the learner before being taught. The teacher can then work their magic, and when we test again the learner will do much better, leading to the conclusion that learning has taken place.

The pretesting effect is different, this is where the learner who takes the test before any formal instruction performs better on subsequent tests than those who didn’t take the pretest. The implication is that the very process of pretesting improves learning.

In a typical pretesting study, one group of learners would take the pretest and the other group would not (The control). All learners then study a specific topic on which they are tested (The post test). Some questions in the post test are from the pretest but some are new, meaning they have never been seen before by either group. The findings from most studies will show that the learners who did the pretest score higher than the control group, but interestingly this is on both the pretested questions and the new ones.

Let’s just pause at that point, this is pretty strange, why would the pretested group do better? All they have done is attempt some questions that on the whole they didn’t know the answer to, which might be pretty demoralising. And it can’t be because the pretested group remembered the answers because we are told they also did better on the questions they had not seen before.

Why might this work?
There have been a lot of studies in this area in order to try to better understand what is happening, for example does the type of question make a difference, Little, J.L., Bjork, what impact does it have if the learner gets the question wrong Richland LE, Kornell N, Kao LS. Spoiler, even if the learner gets the pretest question wrong, they still perform better as a result of doing it.  A word of warning, pretesting is not better than post testing, its just better than learning the material without a pretest.

Here are a few reasons:
– Activates prior knowledge – one suggestion is that pretesting connects new information to what is already known making it more meaningful and easier to remember.
– Increases difficulty (desirable difficulty) – Introducing challenge during the pretests, recalling information before any formal instruction can improve the durability and transferability of learning.
– Increases attention and identifies importance – Being asked a question on a specific area that is not understood might cue the learner to pay greater attention when they come across it later in their studies. It also makes them more aware of the type of questions that will be asked.
– Feedback helps – As with any learning process the feedback received from the pretest can help clarify what the question was asking and of course offers up the answer.
– The hypercorrection effect – This is really interesting, errors committed with high levels of confidence are more likely to be remembered as long as the feedback is persuasive.
– Improves metacognition – Learners become more aware of what they know and what they need to learn.

When you read through this list, there is a rational and maybe it starts to make sense. The difficulty with pretesting is that it sounds so illogical that you don’t even try, why should you waste your time proving that you don’t know something. And if you take the test and get a low score as you believe you will, it’s easy to lose confidence in both yourself and the process. To get the most from this, you need to believe it’s going to work and that its worth the effort and time. It is also important to appreciate that the feeling of discomfort and not knowing is perfectly normal, and that can be hard to do, but as the evidence shows if you an do this, it will ultimately be worth it.

This is worth a read if you would like to know more. Test first, learn later: The power of pretesting to enhance learning, and watch this short video, it explains the concept really well – Pre-Testing: A Better Way to Learn.