In my position at a med school, my students use a lot of practice tests. They use them to prepare for exams in class, for Shelf exams during clinical rotations, and sometimes exclusively to prepare for board exams. One thing I’ve realized in giving advice to these students is that time matters. As someone who knows a lot about spaced practice and retrieval practice,
I want to tell them how to review material in the most effective way, but frankly, they just don’t have time for it.
Often when they use question banks for self-testing, they skip over feedback for correct answers and only keep the questions they got incorrect in rotation. This sure feels efficient, but I know from retrieval practice research that we often need to answer a questions multiple times for it to stick (1).
The research study I’m reviewing today (2) tackles this issue of effectiveness vs. efficiency. In this series of studies, participants either received retrieval practice that was experimenter-controlled, in the most effective way, or they were given the option to do retrieval practice in the way that they wanted, which was typically to drop questions in a more efficient way. Which one is better?
