Premium
Priming productive study strategies with preparatory quizzes in an engineering course
Author(s) -
Gyllen Justin G.,
Stahovich Thomas F.,
Mayer Richard E.,
Entezari Negin,
Darvishzadeh Amirali
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
applied cognitive psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.719
H-Index - 100
eISSN - 1099-0720
pISSN - 0888-4080
DOI - 10.1002/acp.3750
Subject(s) - psychology , priming (agriculture) , class (philosophy) , mathematics education , control (management) , medical education , computer science , medicine , botany , germination , artificial intelligence , biology
Summary One approach to encourage productive study strategies is to incorporate preparatory quizzes (or pre‐quizzes) in which students are required to submit answers to questions before the underlying material is covered in class. In the present study, students took an introductory mechanical engineering class that either included pre‐quizzes (treatment group) or did not (control group). Students in the treatment group visited the online textbook more often and earlier in advance of deadlines, indicating better management of their study time—behaviors that have been shown to be productive study strategies. They also performed better in the course, indicating that techniques intended to prime productive study strategies can pay off. Finally, measures of productive learning strategies correlated with measures of course performance for both groups. These findings support the pretesting principle, which holds that students study more effectively and learn better when they take practice tests before a lesson.