Frequent testing means better grades, studies find

College students who were given a quiz on reading material every week outperformed students who were given comparable homework or who had neither, according to research presented at APA's 1999 Annual Convention in Boston.

Psychologist Bruce W. Tuckman, PhD, of Ohio State University said that the factors that most influence students' motivation to achieve are attitude, strategy and drive, but noted that of the three, drive had been little improved on by college instructors.

To examine the effects of testing on students, Tuckman conducted three studies of college-level education classes. In the first, students taking "spot-quizzes" were compared to students of comparable aptitude who were assigned homework on the same material, and to those who neither took spotquizzes nor completed homework assignments. On final achievement tests, the spotquiz group outperformed the homework group by 16 percent and the control group by 24 percent.

In the second study, the spotquiz group again surpassed the homework group--by 4 percent--but this time students were subdivided according to high, medium and low grade-point averages. Students with low GPAs improved their grades dramatically when they had quizzes to study for every week, outperforming their average and above-average-GPA counterparts by 14 percent.

In the third study, students were classified as high, medium or low procrastinators. Spotquiz students significantly outperformed homework students of comparable aptitude by 7 percent on the course examination. Again, the lowest achievers (high procrastinators) improved the most, exceeding the high-procrastinator homework group by 18 percent.

Typically, college students are tested on only one or two midterm exams and one final exam for a course.

Tuckman did much of his research at Florida State University. He continues research at Ohio State's Academic Learning Lab, which he heads.

--S. Kass

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