On many campuses, this is finals week. That got us wondering: Is the classic format, a midterm and a final examination, the best way to assess student learning? What might work better? We posed those questions to Henry L. (Roddy) Roediger III. Mr. Roediger, a professor of psychology at Washington University in St. Louis, is one of the authors of last year’s Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. The following conversation has been edited and condensed.
Q. Finals are a rite of passage for college students. But are they a good way to evaluate what students have learned throughout a course?
A. It’s kind of like democracy: not a great system, but it’s the best one anybody’s ever devised. They are educationally valuable. We have been arguing that, certainly in higher education, one thing that doesn’t happen enough is assessment, and that the act of preparing for a test and actually taking the test and retrieving information is a great boost to memory.
Let me just give you the two-second version of our experiments. We have people learn something, imagine it’s foreign-language vocabulary. We typically use Swahili, just because nobody comes to the university much knowing Swahili. If you get a word like mashua, “boat,” you can either read that several times or get tested on it several times. Not immediate testing, of course, but spaced out by at least minutes. And the finding is that on immediate tests there’s not much difference. But on delayed tests, say a week later, if you’ve practiced retrieving something, you remember it much better than if you simply reread it.
One other thing we know about learning and memory is that spaced practice is much better than simply learning it all at once and never reviewing it again. Unless you have a cumulative final exam, you don’t get students to review the information from the early part of the course again at the end of the course. I do think final exams are good. I really worry about courses that don’t have them, to be honest. More and more, faculty are not having exams. Well, that means their students are not reviewing the course material they taught them that semester. As long as you have an exam that asks deep, meaningful questions, questions that make people interrelate and integrate things across the course, they’re not just a measurement instrument, but they are a very important learning instrument.
Q. What would a professor who was familiar with your research and wanted to implement it in the classroom do differently?
A. We give some examples in the book. We talk about a professor at Washington University who heard me give a talk. He’s a political-science professor, his name is Andy Sobel. He teaches a large course on international relations. He has fully changed the way he teaches the courses. He used to be kind of traditional, you know, two tests and a final exam. He kept increasing the number of quizzes because it was working so well, so he would give them, let’s say, once a week. It improved class discussion, it improved class attendance. He said it used to be he would try to get discussion going in class, but then it was clear nobody had done the reading, or not many people had done the reading. He said he knew his teacher ratings would take a hit — well, they didn’t. The students said they learned more. They’re kind of shocked when you first tell them, Here’s what I’m doing. But at the end they often say, This is the first college class I really kept up in.
They used to have these things on variety shows where a guy’s got plates [spinning] on a stick. Whichever one’s about to wobble and fall down he would go back and [respin] that one. Well, it’s kind of like the way students do college. If there’s a big physics test this week, psychology takes a hit, they don’t do any reading in psychology. And they just go through the semester like that. You ask them what they’re going to do next — well, it’s whatever they have a big assignment in next. If you give them continual assignments, they can’t use that strategy of just switching topics, and it keeps them more balanced — I mean if everybody did it, of course.
Q. So why doesn’t everyone do it?
A. Well, most people don’t know about the research. And to be honest, the disincentive is it’s a lot more work. I teach history of psychology, for example, and that can be taken by upper-level undergraduates or graduate students. If I’ve got 20 students, I have to read 20 little one-page, two-page essays twice a week, because the class meets twice a week. It’s a lot more work for the professor, but as I tell people, usually doing something right is more work than not doing it right.
Q. Any advice for students studying for exams this week?
A. Unfortunately, it’s kind of too late once you get to exams for much of what I’m saying. It’s really a different mind-set of taking a whole course. What lots of people do is to read and then reread material, underline. Underlining has been found not to be very effective. Rereading has been shown not to be very effective compared to other, better techniques. So testing themselves when they read the first time, if they outline the material, if they put it in their own words, if they just read a section of the book and then put the book down and try to then mentally paraphrase for practice retrieving what they just read.
The metaphor for education that we have is a storehouse of knowledge, as though the big problem is getting information into memory. That’s true, that’s partly valid. But the other big problem we have is getting it out when you need it. And so we have all this practice of reading and trying to get information in. What we don’t give students practice on is accessing the information and having it at their mental fingertips.
Beckie Supiano writes about college affordability, the job market for new graduates, and professional schools, among other things. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.
