Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When learning with self-testing alone, will a learner make inferences between the tested items? This study examines whether self-testing's benefits extend beyond isolated facts to support broader connections between the facts. Comparing self-testing to self-explanation (a strategy known to facilitate inferential learning), we find that while self-testing participants show superior recall of individual facts, they perform significantly worse at making connections between those facts.