Dartmouth Events

Although tests are typically thought of as tools for assessment, a variety of recent research findings has documented that tests also have an important role to play as tools for learning. Indeed, testing—even when no corrective feedback is provided—can be substantially more effective than restudying from the standpoint of supporting the long-term retention of to-be-learned materials. It has typically been thought, however, that it is only tests that clearly involve retrieval (such as cued-recall, short-answer, and free-recall tests) that can induce such learning benefits—not multiple-choice tests. In my talk, I will discuss evidence from both the laboratory and the classroom demonstrating that multiple-choice testing can also be an effective learning tool, a tool that in fact has some advantages over testing formats that tend to be more highly regarded. I will present research not only on how the alternatives in multiple-choice questions need to be designed in order for such tests to be effective as learning tools, but also on the metacognitive strategies that students need to employ to take full advantage of the learning benefits of such tests.
 

Elizabeth Ligon Bjork (Ph.D., Psychology, University of Michigan; B. A., Mathematics, University of Florida) is a Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has served as a member of the Editorial Boards for Perception & Psychophysics and Memory & Cognition, and as a member of the Initial Review Group for the National Institute of Mental Health, Basic Behavioral Processes. She is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. At UCLA, she is the Faculty Sponsor for Psi Chi, the National Honor Society in Psychology for undergraduates and the Psychology Department’s Annual Psychology Undergraduate Research Conference. Within the Department, Dr. Bjork is in charge of the Teacher Training Seminar and Program for Teaching Assistants, and she also chairs the campus-wide Teaching Assistant Training Committee. At the campus-wide level, she has chaired a number of committees concerned with undergraduate education and campus life, including the Committee on Undergraduate Student Support, Honors, and Prizes; the Committee on Student Development; and the Undergraduate Council, which is the overarching committee for all undergraduate programs and affairs. Professor Bjork’s primary area of research is human memory, particularly the role of inhibitory processes in certain types of goal-directed forgetting, such as memory updating, and in the resolution of competition in retrieval. More recently, Dr. Bjork’s research involves how we might apply principles of learning and memory discovered in the laboratory to enhance instructional practices—research funded by a collaborative grant from the James S. McDonnell Foundation. For many years at UCLA, Dr. Bjork has supervised the design and implementation of the Psychology Department’s basic research methods course, which is taken by approximately 1000 students each year and introduces them to the basic principles of the scientific method and how these principles are used to investigate questions in psychology. Students are given hands-on experience in research activities, including the design and conduction of original group projects that are written up as well as presented in a mini-scientific conference held at the end of each term. For her contributions to the development and teaching of this course as well as other instructional activities, Dr. Bjork has been the recipient of the Psychology Department’s Distinguished Teaching Award.