In an experiment to investigate why testing might improve learning, 118 students were given 48 English-Swahili translation pairs. An initial study trialwas followed by three blocks of practice trials. For one group, the practice trial involved a cued recall test followed by restudy. For the other group, they weren’t tested, but were simply presented with the information again (restudy-only). On both study and restudy trials, participants created keywords to help them remember the association. Presumably the 48 word pairs were chosen to make this relatively easy (the example given in the paper is the easy one of wingu-cloud). A final test was given one week later. In this final test, participants received either the cue only (e.g. wingu), or the cue plus keyword, or the cue plus a prompt to remember their keyword.

The group that were tested on their practice trials performed almost three times better on the final test compared to those given restudy only (providing more evidence for the thesis that testing improves learning). Supporting the hypothesis that this has to do with having more effective keywords, keywords were remembered on the cue+prompt trials more often for the test-restudy group than the restudy-only group (51% vs 34%). Moreover, providing the keywords on the final test significantly improved recall for the restudy-only group, but not the test-restudy group (the implication being that they didn’t need the help of having the keywords provided).

The researchers suggest that practice tests lead learners to develop better keywords, both by increasing the strength of the keywords and by encouraging people to change keywords that aren’t working well.