Vaughn, K. E., & Kornell, N. (2019). How to activate students’ natural desire to test themselves. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 4(1), 35

See also: Nate Kornell.

It’s an old trope in the cogpsy literature that Students think restudying is more effective than retrieval practice, even though the latter are much more effective. The experimenters suggest that this might be because retrieval practice seems to be too hard—the failure rate is too high—and that maybe retrieval practice could be made more appealing if people felt they would succeed with it.

The researchers allowed people (n.b. Mechanical Turkers) to request hints during retrieval practice (word pairs), and lo, most people chose retrieval practice. They ran a simplistic experiment to determine the impact of the hints on memory; they found that so long as the hints were subtle (say, 2 letters of the correct word), there wasn’t a significant impact on memory.

In other words, difficult test trials were like black coffee (revolting) while test trials with hints were like coffee with milk and sweetener (heavenly).

Retrieval with hints appears to be a rare case of ‘desirable easiness’; it was similar to a desirable difficulty in terms of the long-term benefits of retrieval being desirable for learning, but it was different in the short term because the easiness brought on by the hints made learners find retrieval desirable as well.

There is a related problem with telling people that testing is good for them. We argue that students already think testing is good for them. We hypothesize that the reason they chose restudy, instead of testing, is not because they think testing is bad. Rather, it is because they are trying to avoid failure.

Last updated 2022-01-05.