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【bio-news】测试有利于提高记忆（sina采用）
Testing Boosts Memory
By Jennifer Cutraro
ScienceNOW Daily News
13 November 2006
Students who break into a cold sweat at the thought of a pop quiz might feel better once they learn about a side effect of test-taking: The practice appears to enhance memory, possibly even more than studying. What's more, according to a new study, testing also helps students remember material that wasn't on the exam in the first place.
Over the past several years, cognitive scientists have documented a phenomenon called the "testing effect," in which taking a test, rather than studying, boosts an individual's ability to remember the material later on. The research led psychology doctoral student Jason Chan and his colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, to wonder whether testing also affects memory for untested materials.
To test the theory, the team had 84 undergraduate students read a passage about toucans, a topic the researchers believed would be unfamiliar to psychology undergraduates. After reading the passage, one-third of the students were dismissed, one-third were asked to read an additional set of study materials that covered the same information as the original passage, and one-third were asked to take a brief short-answer test on the original material. The next day, all participants returned to take a final short-answer test, which included questions from the previous day's brief test as well as new questions.
? Students who took the test the day before scored, on average, 8% higher on the second-day test than did the two groups of students who did not take the initial test.燭his pattern held true for test questions repeated from the previous day's test well as for questions about toucans the students had never seen before, the team reports today in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
? The experiments suggest that taking a test improves memory of related but untested material, says Chan. "If students take a test on only half of the materials in a class, their memory of the other half is not just laying around and not being activated," he says,爏uggesting several tests over a semester might improve students' performance on a final exam. While the study did not explore a possible mechanism, the authors suggest that when people read a test question, they may automatically think of related information. Retrieving the related information may enhance their memory of it, helping them to access that information at a later time.
"This sounds like the kind of thing that would be very beneficial to introduce to classroom practices," says Mitchell Nathan, an educational psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Indeed, cognitive psychologist Steve Lindsay of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, says that evidence for the testing effect is compelling enough that he now begins every class with a pop quiz of the previous day's lecture material. 本人已认领该文编译，48小时后若未提交译文，请其他战友自由认领。 Testing Boosts Memory
By Jennifer Cutraro
ScienceNOW Daily News
13 November 2006
测试提高记忆
Jennifer Cutraro
科学杂志每日新闻
2006.11.13
Students who break into a cold sweat at the thought of a pop quiz might feel better once they learn about a side effect of test-taking: The practice appears to enhance memory, possibly even more than studying. What's more, according to a new study, testing also helps students remember material that wasn't on the exam in the first place.
那些一想到突击测验就冒冷汗的学生，一旦得知测验有这么一个“副作用”可能会感觉好一点：考试似乎可以增强记忆力，甚至可能超过学习的功效。而且，据一项新研究称，测验也有助于学生记住最初不在试卷上的内容。
Over the past several years, cognitive scientists have documented a phenomenon called the "testing effect," in which taking a test, rather than studying, boosts an individual's ability to remember the material later on. The research led psychology doctoral student Jason Chan and his colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, to wonder whether testing also affects memory for untested materials.
近几年来，认知科学家已证实了一种名为“测验/考试效应”的现象，即参加测试，而非经过学习，可以增强个人之后对考试内容的记忆。该研究由在密苏里州圣路易斯的华盛顿大学的心理学博士生Jason Chan及其同事开展，他们很想知道测验是否也影响对未考内容的记忆。
To test the theory, the team had 84 undergraduate students read a passage about toucans, a topic the researchers believed would be unfamiliar to psychology undergraduates. After reading the passage, one-third of the students were dismissed, one-third were asked to read an additional set of study materials that covered the same information as the original passage, and one-third were asked to take a brief short-answer test on the original material. The next day, all participants returned to take a final short-answer test, which included questions from the previous day's brief test as well as new questions.
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作者:admin@医学,生命科学 2011-06-01 17:11
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