The Pretesting Effect: Why Guessing Before You Read Makes You Learn More | Chapterly Blog
The Pretesting Effect: Why Guessing Before You Read Makes You Learn More Quick Answer: The pretesting effect is the finding that attempting to answer questions about material before you have studied it improves your ability to learn and remember that material when you encounter it later. This holds even when your pretest guesses are completely wrong. Research by Richland, Kornell, and Bjork (2009), Kornell, Hays, and Bjork (2009), and others consistently shows that the act of generating an incorrect guess primes the brain to encode the correct answer more deeply than reading it cold. For readers, this means spending a few minutes generating questions and guesses before each chapter dramatically improves retention. You sit down with a book on behavioral economics. Before reading chapter 3 on loss aversion, you ask yourself: "What is loss aversion? How strong is the effect? What are the main criticisms?" You have no idea. You guess anyway. Your guesses are mostly wrong. Then you read the chapter. Two weeks later, you remember the material from that chapter better than any other chapter in the book. This is the pretesting effect, and it is one of the most counterintuitive findings in learning science. Wrong answers, it...