Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent studies suggest that testing helps learning of materials studied after taking the test. However, it is not yet clearhow testing helps subsequent learning. The current study investigated whether testing benefit was due to test expectancyor adjustment of study strategies by contrasting pre-test and interim-test conditions in addition to the restudy controlcondition. Participants learned the painting styles of various artists that were divided into two sections. Participants hadeither a pre-test, interim-test, or interim-restudy on the first section before proceeding to the second section. On thefinal transfer test, the interim-test group outperformed those from the pre-test and restudy groups, implying that only theinterim-test effect existed, but not the pretesting effect. The result suggests that in inductive learning simply knowingabout the test format in advance of study session does not really help learning, rather it is important for learners to testthemselves after studying.