Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The integration of testing practice into learning materials benefits long-term retention over simple studying, a phenomenonknown as the testing effect. Although the benefits of testing are observed in adults, it is uncertain whether young children,who have more constraints on their memory abilities, benefit from learning materials that incorporate testing. Preschool-age children (2-5 years; N=50) learned and were tested on ten novel word-object mappings during repeated storybookreading. Results revealed that childrens testing performance during storybook reading was related to their performance ona final, delayed post-test for retention. Additionally, regression modeling revealed that childrens success in testing duringstorybook reading predicted later retention above and beyond childrens age. These results suggest that, while challengingyoung children through testing can support long-term word learning regardless of age, children need to be successfulduring the challenge to benefit from a testing effect.