An experimental study on the effects of frequent testing

Abstract

AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON THE EFFECTS OF FREQUENT TESTING Abstract Testing has been researched extensively because it is considered to be an important tool for providing students1 with better learning. Thus, this study was done to find out whether frequent testing would increase students1 scores on a post-test, whether there would be a practice effect on students' scores on particular types of questions which they had practiced, and finally, what students' attitudes toward frequent testing were. The effect of frequent testing was investigated through a t-test analysis of the pre- and the post- test scores to determine whether frequent testing of the students within the treatment period, between the pre- and the post- tests, helped students get higher scores on the post-test. The findings showed that giving frequent quizzes to students did not have the effect of increasing students' success on a post- test, despite what had been hypothesized at the beginning of the study. However, the analysis of the gain scores of the students in the three groups, which was handled as a secondary issue and analysed through one-way Anova, and Scheffe, a post hoc test, indicated that the experimental group which received discrete-point quizzes performed better than the other experimental group, which received integrative type quizzes, and the control group,which received no quizzes. Therefore, this performance of the discrete-point group, which was significantly better than the other two groups in terms of their gain scores, may suggest that discrete-point quizzes provided an advantage to the students who took this type of quiz over the ones who did not. The study on practice effect showed that the structural transformation group performed significantly better than the cloze group, on the type of questions they had practiced, however the cloze group could not perform as significantly as the structural transformation group. This was determined through one-way Anova and Scheffe analyses, and as a result, the null hypothesis on the practice effect could only be partially rejected. Finally, the study found no significant relationship between students1 attitudes toward frequent testing and their scores on the post-test. A correlational analysis, PPMC, was carried out to to correlate the students' over-all scores on the post- test with their answers to a questionnaire.