By Amelia Kostin You all know the feeling. A teacher passes out a test, you take a look at the first page and you do not know a single answer. Turns out that feeling is crucial in learning in some cases! The idea of a “practice test”, even if you don’t know the answers, is training your brain to better adapt to the curriculum. Seeing an unknown concept on a test rids the mind of the idea of fluency. Fluency is the incorrect idea that you already know all of the answers. When you see a practice test and realize that you don't know the answers forces your brain to self reflect and learn to pay attention to information you would normally zone out for. The rude awakening of a bombed pretest provides subconscious motivation to pay more attention to the classes to follow. It also forces your brain to pay attention to the information you wouldn’t normally prioritize. I think all of us are guilty when it comes to skimming information to pull out the big picture ideas, but sometimes it gets difficult to know what the curriculum requires you to know. It's only when you take the test, or hopefully practice test, that you realize the information you should've been focusing on. A UCLA psychologist, Bjork, found that in a classroom, pretesting raised the final exam scores by a 10 point average. To conduct her experiment, she gave some of her students a pretest on the first day of class, which they understandably performed very poorly on. However, they got proper feedback and knew what to focus on for the rest of the course. The other half of the class got the same information given to them over the course, but didn't have the guidelines for what to focus on. At the end of the school year, she handed out the final exam and found that the students who took the pretest scored 10% higher on the related questions. This conclusion shows that simply by introducing the concepts early in the year in the form of a test, you can improve your overall grade and the knowledge you gained. This concept still applies to multiple-choice questions as well. When you study by flashcards or even a quizlet, you are only studying the correct answers. By the time of the test, you won’t be able to sort out the wrong ones. Taking a pretest when studying is crucial because it trains your mind to eliminate wrong answers and helps you become more confident in your right ones. When you are studying, be sure to test yourself so you have full knowledge of the material, inside and out. So, the next time your teacher hands out a “pop quiz” at the beginning of the year to test your knowledge, or gives a practice test before an exam, don’t roll your eyes. Know that they are doing what’s best for you and your learning. So go, fail that pretest! APA Citation
Carey, B. (2014, September 4). Why Flunking Exams Is Actually a Good Thing. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/magazine/why-flunking-exams-is-actually-a-good-thing.html. Link to the article! https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/magazine/why-flunking-exams-is-actually-a-good-thing.html. Linktotheimage! https://previews.123rf.com/images/dolgachov/dolgachov1908/dolgachov190801619/129028628-sad-student-girl-with-failed-school-test-at-home.jpg
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