The Developmental Differences Of Testing Effect And How It Relates To Memory Monitoring And Control

How to improve the memory retention is a traditional problem in memory psychology. Recently, many cognitive psychologists put a renewed effort to learn how different learning ways influence the short-term and long-term memory, and had found that some intuitively effective memory strategies enhanced the short-term retention at the expense of impairing the long-term retention. Testing effect was one of the pop issues concerned this research domain.Tests enhance later retention more than additional study of the material, even when tests are given without feedback. This surprising phenomenon is called the testing effect, which meant that test was not only working as a diagnostic tool, but also had learning function that could enhance memory. Current studies had testified testing effect in various experimental conditions, and almost all of them found the strong effect of testing on the memory, based on which a lot of theories had been put forward to explain why it happened. However, most of these studies could be regarded as dedication at the object level, and when considering the application of testing effect in the practice, it was very important to implement the studies at the meta-level. In this research, the author tried to integrate both the object level and the meta-level points of testing effect on an application perspective, so as to discuss the relations between testing effect and what it meant to students' learning.The research could be divided into three main parts including Preparation Study, Study1 and Study 2.The purpose of the Preparation Study was to reveal the potential negative effect that maybe happen during the memory monitoring and control, based on which introducing the studies about the developmental differences of testing effect and how it relates to memory monitoring and control. Study 1 included two experiments, in which experiment 1 probed into the developmental differences of testing effect and experiment 2 separated the different contributions of familiarity and recollection on testing effect to explain the conclusions drawn on experiment1. Based on Study 1, Study 2 used three experiments to analyze the between testing effect and memory monitoring and control. Experiment 3 discussed how memory monitoring influence the memory control when people were involved in the study choice between repeated encoding and retrieval practice, and which study choice mode was better for long-term retention of memory. Experiment 4 tried to verify if immediate feedback and delayed feedback do different enhancement for effective memory. Experiment 5 was carried to find the development difference of the memory control mode for repeated encoding and test.Within the experiment conditions of the research, the author drew the conclusions as follows.Firstly, during the memory monitoring and control, people might risk underestimating the benefit of continuing learning the items that could be retrieved correctly once, and resulted in poor memory retention. Testing these items can have enormous memory benefits for later retention, and the testing effect can work for students in grade 5 of the primary school, students in grade 2 of the junior high school, and students in grade 2 of the senior high school.Secondly, the study choice between test and repeated encoding during the memory monitoring and control showed developmental differences, that it was test-orientation memory control mode of students in grade 2 of junior high school, students in grade 2 of senior high school and sophomores, except students in grade 5 of primary school. Although subjects chose to test themselves during memory showed better retention after a delay, they didn't take the testing as a means that can promote long-term memory. They chose to test themselves to figure out how well they master the material.Thirdly, repeated encoding and testing promoted the recollection and familiarity retrieval processes of memory differently: Repeated encoding benefited the short-term performance relative to testing by enhancing familiarity, while testing benefited the long-term performance by enhancing recollection.Fourthly, repeated encoding could lead to rapid gains in initial learning during the acquirement phase, it produced poor long-term retention. On the contrary, although testing memory made learning slower or more effortful, it enhanced long-term retention and help people achieve effective memory.