Here’s a study strategy most students consider last, if at all: take a test on the material before you’ve finished studying it. It sounds counterintuitive — even backwards. But an overwhelming body of research shows that testing yourself on information, even before you know it well, produces dramatically better long-term retention than additional studying.
This is the testing effect, also called the retrieval practice effect, and it may be the single most underused study technique available to students at every level.
In a landmark 2006 study, Roediger and Karpicke tested students on prose passages under different conditions: studying repeatedly, or studying once and then being tested repeatedly. On a final test one week later, the repeated-testing group remembered 61% of the material compared to 40% for the repeated-studying group. Same time, dramatically different outcomes.
Further research revealed something even more striking: testing on material you haven’t yet learned (pre-testing) improves subsequent learning of that material. Students who were tested on content before they’d been taught it — and who got many questions wrong — later learned the actual material faster and retained it longer than students who received the material first and were tested later.
The mechanism appears to involve a type of priming: attempting to retrieve information, even unsuccessfully, activates neural search processes that make the brain more receptive to and retentive of the target information when it’s subsequently encountered.
Free recall tests. Blank paper, no prompts. Write down everything you know about a topic. This is the most effortful form and produces the strongest memory benefits.
Cued recall tests. Questions with prompts that partially constrain the answer — like flashcard questions or short-answer exam questions. This is the format of most academic exams and closely mirrors what you’ll face under real testing conditions.
Recognition tests. Multiple-choice and true/false formats. These are the least effortful form of retrieval practice and produce the weakest (though still real) memory benefits compared to free recall.
Application tests. Problems, case studies, and scenarios that require applying knowledge in novel ways. These produce the deepest understanding and the most transferable learning, though they’re also the most challenging to create.
Use past exams. Most courses have previous exams available. These are invaluable — they test the same material at the same difficulty level as your upcoming exam, and completing them reveals exactly where your knowledge is weak.
Do end-of-chapter questions. Textbook questions, which most students skip, are ready-made retrieval practice tools. Do them before reviewing the chapter to exploit the pre-testing effect.
Create your own test. As you review material, write down the 5–10 questions a reasonable exam might ask. Then close your notes and answer them. This doubles as a Feynman-technique exercise — if you can’t articulate clear questions, you don’t understand the material well enough yet.
Interleave topics. Rather than testing yourself on one topic exhaustively before moving to the next, mix topics across a single practice session. Research on interleaving shows this reduces performance during practice but significantly improves long-term retention and transfer.
Time yourself. Practice tests under realistic time pressure train not just knowledge but test-taking speed and anxiety management.
Consider two students spending the same 90 minutes on a history chapter:
One week later, Student B consistently outperforms Student A in studies. Not because Student B studied more, but because retrieval practice is more cognitively demanding and produces more durable memories than passive re-exposure.
Making errors during practice testing is not just acceptable — it’s part of what makes testing effective. Research shows that immediately correcting a wrong answer after testing produces stronger retention of the correct answer than simply studying the correct answer without a prior retrieval attempt.
This has important implications for how you use practice tests. Don’t wait until you’re confident to start testing yourself. Test early, tolerate the errors, correct them carefully, and watch your performance improve. The errors aren’t setbacks — they’re the mechanism through which testing improves learning.
When you combine the testing effect with active recall techniques and spaced repetition, you have a complete, research-backed system for learning that the evidence strongly supports.