Dr Pooja Agarwal PhD and her colleagues studied the effects of retrieval practice (basically trying to remember to you and me) with students in a middle school social studies course (McDaniel, Agarwal, Huelser, McDermott, & Roediger, 2011). Over the course of a year and a half, while the teacher continued teaching as normal, students were regularly quizzed on the material with no-stakes quizzes, meaning they wouldn’t count against their grades. These quizzes only covered about one-third of what was being taught. The teacher left the room for every quiz, so she had no knowledge of what was included in the quizzes.

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The Results Speak Volumes

On end-of-unit exams, students scored a full grade level higher on the material from the quizzes than on any of the other material. The other concepts had been taught and reviewed by the teacher as they normally would; the only difference was that some things also appeared on the no-stakes quizzes, and those were the concepts students retained more fully when tested on the exam.

It is a fact that quizzes are an effective way of learning and revising for exams!

Here’s what this means for teachers:

When we teach something once, they want to do something else to help students learn it better, instead of just reviewing the content, we’re much better off giving something like a quiz instead. In other words, if we do more asking students to pull concepts out of their brains, rather than continually trying to put concepts in, students will actually learn those concepts better.– To read about other studies on retrieval practice, click here.

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Serious Learning

Quizzing, although we do everything we can to make it fun and enjoyable, its nothing but serious learning. As we say “proof is in the pudding” and you will see from your student, regular use of our platform will increase their grades and improve their better results. It is like anything, if you put the work in, you will see the results.

However, what’s excellent about quizzing and our platform, is that students need to put far less time compared to more traditional methods of learning. This is something all students will love!

The very act of being quizzed actually helped students learn better.