This is enlightening. The method of reading, testing, reading, testing is pretty obvious. The fact that the students who learned MORE believed they had learned LESS is quite fascinating.

If I had to create a quiz like this for every reading, it would take too much time. So, can a clever programmer devise an auto-quizzer that would scan text and create a retention quiz for any text that one wanted to study in-depth? Seems possible to me. What an interesting idea. You decide when to quiz yourself, and thus you make yourself the expert you want to be.

Jeffrey D. Karpicke and Janell R. Blunt from Purdue University published a paper in Science this month that measured the amount of information people could remember a week after reading a scientific text.

Students who completed an elaborate test after reading the text remembered 145% more content after a week than students who simply read the text and didn’t do anything else.

Interestingly, the people who took the test thought that they had learned 15% less than the people who read the text but didn’t take the test, even though they’d actually learned much more. This discrepancy between belief and reality adds another twig of evidence to the huge pile of existing studies telling us to observe users’ actual behavior and not go by what they say.

via Test-Taking Enhances Learning (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox).