Introduction

What you’ll learn to do: explore how testing benefits learning

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.

—Winston Churchill

By the end of this section, you will be able to identify the learning benefits of test taking and identify strategies for learning from mistakes and learning from doing poorly on tests or exams.

Learning from Test Results

After the Test

As you leave the exam room, the last thing you may want to think about is that particular test. You probably have numerous other assignments, projects, and life obligations to attend to, especially if you pushed some of those off to study for this completed exam. Give yourself some space from this exam, but only for the duration of the time when your instructor is grading your exam. Once you have your results, study them—whether you did really well (Go, you!) or not as well as you had hoped (Keep your spirits up!). Both scenarios hold valuable information if you will use it.

Thandie had a habit of going all-out for exams before she took them, and she did pretty well usually. But once the instructor passed back the graded tests, she would look at the letter grade, glance half-heartedly at the instructor’s comments, and toss the exam away, ready to move on to the next chapter, section, or concept. A better plan would be to learn from her exam results and analyze both what she did well and where she struggled. After a particularly unimpressive exam outing in her statistics class, Thandie took her crumpled-up exam to the campus tutoring center, where the tutor reviewed the test with her section by section. Together they discovered that Thandie did particularly well on the computational sections, which she admitted were her favorites, and not well at all on the short-answer essay questions that she did not expect to find in a stats class, which in her experience had been more geared toward the mathematical side of solving statistical problems.

Benefits of Test Taking

While testing may be stressful, there is actually a number of learning benefits to testing that you should consider.

• When you are tested—especially often—it encourages you to study more and procrastinate less.
• The more you retrieve information, as you do during a test or quiz, the more likely you are to retain it in the long run.
• You may learn more when you take a test than when you study for it or are just taught the material. For example, if you are asked to learn five formulas for a math test, you will likely remember the three formulas you are actually tested on better than the others.
• Taking a test helps your brain organize knowledge better, and that helps you retrieve the knowledge more efficiently.^[1]

So, testing is not just a method of measuring how much you know (or torturing you). It can actually help you learn. In addition, the results of a test—even when you don’t do very well—can also enhance your learning in valuable ways.

Learning from Mistakes

Two of the most important messages that students hear from teachers are “Don’t be afraid to fail” and “Learn from your mistakes—yours, mine, and ours.” The following TedEd talk explores these familiar ideas. The speaker, Diana Laufenberg, makes the case for why learning through experience, feeling empowered, and embracing failure are all so important to students—so much more so than just going to school to get information.

You can view the transcript for “Diana Laufenberg: How to learn? From mistakes” here.

The idea of learning from one’s mistakes seems straightforward enough, but how does one actually do it? After all, who isn’t disappointed to get a low grade on anything—a test, a quiz, a paper, a project? We all want to do well. Consider the following college students evaluating their own performance:

I recently took a general biology exam and I was so certain that I got all questions right—that I got a 100 percent on the exam. Then I found out this morning that I got a 94 percent! And what annoys me more than the grade is the fact that my mistakes were dumb. Why did I make dumb mistakes? The tests are timed and I don’t have much time to check my answers.^[2]

I’m so mad at myself. I’ve tried everything, I come back to look at the answer after I’ve completed the rest of the test. I go over the answers carefully. It seems as though no matter what I do I can’t catch my mistakes. I just did it on an accounting test. I missed one question because I didn’t notice the answer was “All of the above.” I have the same problem in another class.

At times we can be hard on ourselves, especially if we feel we could have done better. Learning from mistakes takes practice and reinforcement. As Diana Laufenberg pointed out in her Ted Talk, mistakes can be one of the most important events that happen in a classroom, because they tell you where you need to focus next.^[3]

After you get over the disappointment of making a mistake in the first place, the next step is to home in on why you made it. That’s the learning opportunity. Below are some tips for following up on—and addressing—a range of errors that students commonly make on exams and other assessments.

Tips for Test Follow-up^[4]

Reflection and Further Study

For some additional guidance on what to do in the event of failure and how to proceed with your studies, watch Dr. Stephen Chew’s video I Blew The Exam—Now What?

You can view the transcript for “How to Get the Most Out of Studying: Part 5 of 5, ‘I Blew the Exam, Now What?'” here.

Chew emphasizes the following points:

What not to do:

• Don’t panic
• Don’t go into denial

What to do:

• Do examine how you prepared; be honest with yourself
• Do review the exam; compare errors with notes taken
• Do talk with your professor
• Do examine your study habits
• Do develop a plan

Helpful strategies to raise your grade:

• Commit time and effort
• Minimize distractions
• Attend class
• Set realistic goals
• Don’t begin to slide
• Don’t give away points

Don’t be the student who . . .

• keeps studying the same way, hoping to improve
• waits until the end of the term to ask for help
• skips class to focus on other classes
• falls further behind waiting to find time to catch up
• crams at the last minute
• doesn’t do assignments because they are small or late
• panics and gives up