Untangling the benefits of multiple study opportunities and repeated testing for cued recall

Spacing multiple study opportunities apart from one another is known by psychologists to be a highly effective study method (see Dempster, 1996). This study examines whether including tests during study would produce practical benefits for learning beyond that provided by distributed study alone. In addition, spacing of both study and test (massed, uniform distributed, and expanding distributed) is investigated. To-be-remembered information was repeated with a single learning session (Experiment 1), reviewed immediately after initial learning (Experiment 2), or reviewed days after initial learning (Experiments 3 and 4). As expected, large distributed practice effects were shown across experiments. In addition to these effects, testing produced significant benefits for learning in all four experiments, which were of moderate or large size (Cohen's d of 0.52 to 1.30) for three experiments. Expanding test spacing, however, did not independently benefit learning in any of the learning situations studied. Educators should take advantage of the large benefits that distributed study and testing have on learning by spacing multiple tests of information within learning sessions and by distributing tests across multiple review sessions. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.