# @edutopia on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/CXT0fb8M-33
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/20303584-edutopia-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/thumbnails/bc38032253.jpg
- **Posted:** 2021-12-10T16:51:50.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Edutopia (@edutopia) — https://gondola.cc/edutopia

## Caption

Asking students to take a practice test before they’ve even encountered the material may seem like a waste of time—after all, they’d just be guessing.

But new research concludes that the approach, called pretesting, is actually more effective than other typical study strategies. Surprisingly, pretesting even beat out taking practice tests after learning the material, a proven strategy endorsed by cognitive scientists and educators alike. In the study, students who took a practice test before learning the material outperformed their peers who studied more traditionally by 49 percent on a follow-up test, while outperforming students who took practice tests after studying the material by 27 percent.

The researchers hypothesize that the “generation of errors” was a key to the strategy’s success, spurring student curiosity and priming them to “search for the correct answers” when they finally explored the new material—and adding grist to a 2018 study that found that making educated guesses helped students connect background knowledge to new material.

Learning is more durable when students do the hard work of correcting misconceptions, the research suggests, reminding us yet again that being wrong is an important milestone on the road to being right

Follow #EDUResearchHighlights2021 as we highlight 10 of the most significant educational studies from 2021—covering topics from bias in kids' books to the ‘paper versus digital’ war.

For more information and a clickable link to the research study check out our link in bio.

#Pretesting #EducationResearch

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## Tags

pretesting, educationresearch, eduresearchhighlights2021

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