Effects Of The Familiarity And Amount Of The Learning Content On The Testing Effect

Testing effect refers to the fact that testing is more conducive to maintaining the learned content over the long term than learning(Delaney,Verkoeijen,& Spirgel,2010;Roediger &Karpicke,2006).In the previous numerous experimental studies on test effect,most of the experimental materials were the content that the participants have learned or are familiar with,and whether there was testing effect in the unlearned or unfamiliar content has not been investigated yet.Zaromb and Roediger(2010),based on their comparison with previous experimental results,proposed that the number of learning contents or the length of the vocabulary may have an important influence on the testing effect.However,no experimental studies have examined whether the amount of content studied affects the testing effect.Therefore,we chose Chinese native language,English second language,but have never learned Japanese college students as the participants,with English vocabulary,Chinese vocabulary and Japanese Katakana vocabulary as the experimental materials,to do five comparative experimental studies.The first three experiments were based on English words,Chinese words and Japanese Katakana words.The latter two experiments were based on "Katakana Words + Pronunciation" and "Katakana Words + Pronunciation + Chinese Meaning".In these experiments,learning methods were taken as independent variables and final test scores as dependent variables to compare the learning effects of "relearning" and "testing" in different length vocabulary lists.The results showed that:(1)The testing effect was achieved when learning or memorizing the Chinese word list,which was very familiar to the mother tongue.Only the long word list(10-22 Chinese words)produced testing effect.By learning the familiar second language(English)vocabulary,the length of the testing-effect vocabulary(6-16 English words)was correspondingly shortened.Shorter Chinese and English word lists have no testing effect within the short-term memory span of the participants.(2)When learning or memorizing the Katakana glyphs and phonetic katakana vocabulary for the first time,it was better to learn from the longer vocabulary(4-8 Katakana vocabulary).The short Katakana word list(the number of less than 4 Katakana words)showed no significant difference in learning effect between the restudy learning group and test group.(3)When learning or memorizing the phonic-katakana word list for the first time,only the medium length of the word list(2-4 katakana words)produced the testing effect;Shorter(less than 2 katakana words)or longer lists(4-8 katakana words)did not produce the testing effect,but the restudy group did better than test group in the longer list.In conclusion,the testing effect was influenced by the familiarity of the words,the new and old words and the length of the vocabulary.The more familiar the participants were with the vocabulary,the more the number of words or the longer the vocabulary list.On the contrary,it is less or shorter.There was a testing effect when memorizing more old words,but there was no testing effect when memorizing a new glyph,on the other hand,"restudy" had a better learning effect.Learning or memorizing the shape and sound of a new word was beneficial to the testing effect of the medium length vocabulary,while learning the shape and sound of a new word at the same time had no significant promoting effect.