Pretesting, an education strategy in which teachers provide no-stakes quizzes to students before they’ve learned a topic, is earning high marks in cognitive research.
During one study, a group of college students who took pretests before learning outperformed a separate group who only took post-tests. For the study, researchers conducted five experiments with 1,573 students and found that students who received a pre-lesson test or post-lesson test learned more than those that did not, and that those who received a pretest scored the highest on subsequent tests.
