テストは学習効果がある！

昨日紹介したNatureでの科学教育をどうするかという特集で、Scientific Americanの方でTOEICkerの励みとなりそうな記事がありました。テストは学習効果が高いというのです。まあ但し書きもあるので使い方を工夫する必要がありそうですが。。。このブログでは何度か取り上げていますが、アメリカの場合は標準テストの成績で学校の補助金が変わってしまうそうですから、テスト中心のあり方には賛否両論があることを予備知識として知っておいた方がよさそうです。

Researchers Find That Frequent Tests Can Boost Learning
Too often school assessments heighten anxiety and hinder learning. New research shows how to reverse the trend
By Annie Murphy Paul | Jul 14, 2015

In schools across the U.S., multiple-choice questions such as this one provoke anxiety, even dread. Their appearance means it is testing time, and tests are big, important, excruciatingly unpleasant events.

書き出しからして、読者はテストに好印象を持っていないことを前提に書かれていますね。４０００語とTIMEのカバーストーリー並みに長い記事ですが、中心はテスト効果の検索練習（retrieval practice）によるメリットについてです。Wikipediaの説明とIn Briefを読んでから記事本文を読むと楽に読み進められるかもしれません。

Words checked = [4123]
Words in Oxford 3000™ = [88%]

(Wikipedia)
テスト効果は、単に情報を聞いたり書いたりするのに比べ、情報を思い出す（検索する）行為をする結果として記憶が強化されることをいう。この効果は「検索練習（retrieval practice）」や、「テスト強化学習（test-enhanced learning）」ともいわれることがある。
テスト効果について多くの研究が実験心理学者によってなされている。そういった研究のひとつに、被験者に刺激語(stimulus word)と反応語(response word)を見せ、2つの間の関係の学習を求めるものがある。まず、10秒間コンピュータ画面上に2つの語を同時に見せる標準的なテストを用意する。それに対して、刺激語のみをまず5秒間見せ、その後5秒間両方の語を見せるようにするテストを比較する。後者がすべての情報をより長く見せているはずの前者のテストと比べ、極めてよい（刺激語が反応語を想起させるという）連想記憶を作り出す結果が得られている。‪[1]‬
最近の研究では、このテストが最初の記憶強化だけではなく忘却をスローダウンさせることが発見されている。

In Brief
• Since the enactment of No Child Left Behind in 2002, parents' and teachers' opposition to the law's mandate to test “every child, every year” in grades three through eight has been intensifying.
• Critics charge that the high-stakes assessments inflict anxiety on students and teachers, turning classrooms into test-preparation factories instead of laboratories of meaningful learning.
• Research in cognitive science and psychology shows that testing, done right, can be an effective way to learn. Taking tests can produce better recall of facts and a deeper understanding than an education devoid of exams.
• 　　Tests being developed to assess how well students have met the Common Core State Standards show promise as evaluations of deep learning.

検索練習（retrieval practice）についての説明は記事では以下の通り。

Retrieval practice does not use testing as a tool of assessment. Rather it treats tests as occasions for learning, which makes sense only once we recognize that we have misunderstood the nature of testing. We think of tests as a kind of dipstick that we insert into a student's head, an indicator that tells us how high the level of knowledge has risen in there—when in fact, every time a student calls up knowledge from memory, that memory changes. Its mental representation becomes stronger, more stable and more accessible.

Why would this be? It makes sense considering that we could not possibly remember everything we encounter, says Jeffrey Karpicke, a professor of cognitive psychology at Purdue University. Given that our memory is necessarily selective, the usefulness of a fact or idea—as demonstrated by how often we have had reason to recall it—makes a sound basis for selection. “Our minds are sensitive to the likelihood that we'll need knowledge at a future time, and if we retrieve a piece of information now, there's a good chance we'll need it again,” Karpicke explains. “The process of retrieving a memory alters that memory in anticipation of demands we may encounter in the future.”

検索練習（retrieval practice）の効果の一つとして、学習の定着率が高いことを説明してくれています。

According to Karpicke, retrieving is the principal way learning happens. “Recalling information we've already stored in memory is a more powerful learning event than storing that information in the first place,” he says. “Retrieval is ultimately the process that makes new memories stick.” Not only does retrieval practice help students remember the specific information they retrieved, it also improves retention for related information that was not directly tested. Researchers theorize that while sifting through our mind for the particular piece of information we are trying to recollect, we call up associated memories and in so doing strengthen them as well. Retrieval practice also helps to prevent students from confusing the material they are currently learning with material they learned previously and even appears to prepare students' minds to absorb the material still more thoroughly when they encounter it again after testing (a phenomenon researchers call “test-potentiated learning”).

Hundreds of studies have demonstrated that retrieval practice is better at improving retention than just about any other method learners could use. To cite one example: in a study published in 2008 by Karpicke and his mentor, Henry Roediger III of Washington University, the authors reported that students who quizzed themselves on vocabulary terms remembered 80 percent of the words later on, whereas students who studied the words by repeatedly reading them over remembered only about a third of the words. Retrieval practice is especially powerful compared with students' most favored study strategies: highlighting and rereading their notes and textbooks, practices that a recent review found to be among the least effective.

また、テストは文脈に関連付けて学習するDeep learningにもつながるとも述べています。

In their study, Karpicke and Blunt directed groups of undergraduate volunteers—200 in all—to read a passage taken from a science textbook. One group was then asked to create a concept map while referring to the text; another group was asked to recall, from memory, as much information as they could from the text they had just read. On a test given to all the students a week later, the retrieval-practice group was better able to recall the concepts presented in the text than the concept-mapping group. More striking, the former group was also better able to draw inferences and make connections among multiple concepts contained in the text. Overall, Karpicke and Blunt concluded, retrieval practice was about 50 percent more effective at promoting both factual and deep learning.

Transfer—the ability to take knowledge learned in one context and apply it to another—is the ultimate goal of deep learning. In an article published in 2010 University of Texas at Austin psychologist Andrew Butler demonstrated that retrieval practice promotes transfer better than the conventional approach of studying by rereading. In Butler's experiment, students engaged either in rereading or in retrieval practice after reading a text that pertained to one “knowledge domain”—in this case, bats' use of sound waves to find their way around. A week later the students were asked to transfer what they had learned about bats to a second knowledge domain: the navigational use of sound waves by submarines. Students who had quizzed themselves on the original text about bats were better able to transfer their bat learning to submarines.

ここまではTOEICkerも狂喜乱舞しながら読んでいられると思いますが、このような効果があるのは、“rapid, targeted, and structured feedback”が必要とのことで、ここからTOEICのようなstandardized testsの批判に移っていきます。Scores on these tests often arrive weeks or even months after the test is taken. And to maintain the security of test items—and to use the items again on future tests—testing firms do not offer item-by-item feedbackと、スコアが出るのが遅いのと、どの問題を間違えたのかわからないという点を挙げています。さらには、The questions they ask are overwhelmingly of a superficial nature—which leads, almost inevitably, to superficial learning.と表面的な内容なので、表面的な理解か生み出さないとテスト自体のあり方にも疑問を呈しています。

Gosling and Pennebaker, who (along with U.T. graduate student Jason Ferrell) published their findings on the effects of daily quizzes in 2013 in the journal PLOS ONE, credited the “rapid, targeted, and structured feedback” that students received with boosting the effectiveness of repeated testing. And therein lies a dilemma for American public school students, who take an average of 10 standardized tests a year in grades three through eight, according to a recent study conducted by the Center for American Progress. Unlike the instructor-written tests given by the teachers and professors profiled here, standardized tests are usually sold to schools by commercial publishing companies. Scores on these tests often arrive weeks or even months after the test is taken. And to maintain the security of test items—and to use the items again on future tests—testing firms do not offer item-by-item feedback, only a rather uninformative numerical score.

There is yet another feature of standardized state tests that prevents them from being used more effectively as occasions for learning. The questions they ask are overwhelmingly of a superficial nature—which leads, almost inevitably, to superficial learning.

この記事を基にほらやっぱりTOEICはダメだというのは短絡的でしょう。すぐに答え合わせをして、間違ったところを確認するようにすれば学習効果が高いのは実験で証明されているからです。TBRの規模が小さくなったのは残念なことですが、今のTOEIC界は究極のゼミ合宿をはじめとして、学習会を開いて不明点をつぶすという流れになっていますから、学習会に参加しているTOEICkeの方々はテストを効果的に使っていると胸をはっていいのかもしれませんね。