Testing Together: Collaborative and Individual Practice Testing Can Yield Different Patterns of Learning Following Practice Testing with Varied Test Formats

Considerable research attests that practice testing (sometimes referred to as retrieval practice) is a potent enhancer of memory (Bjork, 1975; Roediger & Karpicke, 2006; Rowland, 2014). Practice testing is thought to enhance learning because the act of retrieving information makes it more recallable in the future, possibly by strengthening or adding retrieval pathways to that information (Bjork, 1975) or by increasing the integration of recalled content with other information stored in long-term memory (Bjork & Bjork, 1992). A particularly useful feature of practice testing is its flexibility: Learners can engage in practice testing using a variety of unstructured (e.g., free-recall) and structured (e.g., multiple-choice) item formats. Much of the research on the efficacy of practice testing for learning, however, has centered on practice testing individually, despite evidence that working with others on other types of tasks (e.g., problem solving) can potentiate learning (Johnson & Johnson, 2009). Collaboration might also facilitate processes, behaviors, and cognitions which could impact the efficacy of practice testing for learning, such as offering and receiving explanations (Lou et al., 2001), engaging in overt retrieval of information (Tauber et al., 2018), and correcting errors (Barber et al., 2010). I therefore explored if practice testing together (collaborative practice testing) would yield different patterns of learning than practice testing alone. I did so across three learning contexts—a large undergraduate STEM course, an online laboratory setting, and an in-person laboratory setting—and across three different structured test formats: multiple-choice, true-false, and flashcards. I elected to use structured practice test formats as they tend to more clearly guide learners’ retrieval than unstructured test formats and therefore offer the possibility to more clearly interpret differential patterns in learning as evidence of differential patterns of retrieval during the practice testing event. Overall, I find evidence that collaborative practice testing can result in different patterns of learning than individual practice testing (Chapters 2 and 3) and learning-relevant outcomes (i.e., monitoring of one’s learning; Chapter 4). Taken together, these findings suggest that learners may have much to gain by practice testing with others