Cognitive Science Says This Is the Best Way to Learn Faster, Increase Recall, and Improve Your Memory

How does learning work? Encode, store, retrieve: take it in, find a place for it, pull it out when you need it. If you can’t retrieve information, you haven’t really learned it.

So since we all learn best by doing, it only makes sense that testing yourself — as long as you do it the right way — is the best way to learn faster and retain more.

Granted, taking a test kind of sucks. Tests assess, measure, and judge, and who enjoys being judged? Taking a test can feel high pressure, high stakes.

But what if there is no pressure? What if there are no stakes? What if a test isn’t used to evaluate your knowledge, but help you learn faster and better?

A meta-review of a number of studies published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that self-testing — which is inherently low-stakes, since testing yourself means you’re the only person who knows the results — is the most effective way to speed up the learning process. A massive study published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest backs up that finding, showing that self-testing is the most effective learning technique, edging out distributed practice and interleaving.

Why? Partly because of the additional context self-testing naturally creates. Quiz yourself and answer incorrectly, and not only will you be more likely to remember the right answer after you look it up, you’ll also remember the fact you didn’t remember.

Getting something wrong is a great way to remember it the next time, especially if you tend to be hard on yourself. In a weird way, when it comes to memory, what you got wrong can be stickier than what you got right.

For example, I sat in the parking lot looking up the answer to a question I thought I had gotten wrong on the Class A contractor’s license exam; I feel sure I’ll never forget that bolts must be placed within 12 inches of all sill plate joints. You could argue that was a high-pressure situation, but it really wasn’t. Instead of studying a lot to prepare, I took the test to see what I needed to learn since you can retake the test as often as necessary within a one-year period.

I truly saw it as practice test, so the stakes felt low. (As it turned out out I passed the first time, but I still remember the answers to questions I thought I had gotten wrong, and looked up afterwards.)

The same approach works when you’re teaching new employees. Say you’re training new technicians to perform a process. Stop halfway and give them a pop quiz, and the stakes — since the quiz feels like an assessment, not a learning tool — and they’ll feel the stakes are high. (If nothing else, no one likes to be wrong in front of other people.)

But what if you pass out a quick quiz, let them take it, go over the answers, and tell them to throw away their papers when you’re done? Take makes it a low-stakes test that fosters learning.

And provide a number of other positive outcomes. According to a study published in Psychology of Learning and Motivation, low-stakes self-testing provides a number of benefits:

• Self-testing (and retrieving) aids retention. Learning a presentation? Quiz yourself on what comes after your intro. Quiz yourself by listing the four main points you want to make. Quiz yourself on sales estimates, key initiatives, or results from competitive analysis. That will force you to practice retrieving the information you want to remember, which will make it stickier.
• Self-testing identifies knowledge gaps. Test yourself, and you’ll quickly discover what you don’t know. Then you can focus on learning that. (And you’ll be more likely to remember that information since you didn’t know it the first time.)
• Self-testing helps you learn more the next time you study. Studies show that people who took a test before they studied retained information better than those who did not. (Think of it as priming your study pump.)
• Self-testing organizes knowledge. Reading is fairly passive. Testing forces you to make connections, or recognizes gaps in your ability to make connections. Testing helps you realize, “Ah — this goes with that,” or “This causes that,” and makes you cluster information so it makes better sense.
• Self-testing helps transfer knowledge to new situations. People who are repeatedly tested are better able to apply what they know to new situations. Think of it as the, “Hmm, this is a lot like that, but with one little twist” effect. 
• Self-testing helps retrieve information not tested. Granted, this one seems odd. Still: take a test, and you’ll better remember information that was studied but not tested. (I’m guessing that’s the result of the overall memory boost frequent low-stakes testing provides.) 
• Self-testing prevents interference from prior material. Try to learn a lot at once, and it all tends to run together. Or, more likely, you’ll remember what you learned early in the session, but after a while the rest is just a blur. Toss in a few quizzes along the way, though, and that doesn’t tend to happen. If you need to learn a lot of material, break the session into chunks by inserting a few quizzes. (And if you’re teaching new employees a lot of material, definitely throw in a few low-stakes quizzes.)

​Best of all, testing tends to encourage more learning. While self-testing certainly reveals what you don’t know — at least not yet — it also helps you feel good about how much you have learned.

The result is a virtuous cycle. You feel good about improving, which motivates you to keep trying to improve, self-testing reveals you’ve continued to improve.

That’s another benefit of frequent, low-stakes testing.

Not only do you learn more, you also want to learn more.