Psyc101 Self Assessment

During my self-testing, I will usually do practice problems near the end of each chapter in books, ask and answer questions when studying with friends, and for chemistry I have been doing the practice exams that the professors provide as well. Self-testing as I am now, is decently effective. By self-testing, I am able to see what material I am not comprehending and then am able to go back to that section and restudy it. However, by not truly knowing what information I am not comprehending until I have studied and self-tested over everything, I am forced to sometimes restudy more material than I would like.

One of the main controversial disputes regarding education is if test taking is actually a beneficial form of a learning technique for students. Within the context of Henry L. Roediger III’s article, How Tests Make Us Smarter, Roediger goes into depth upon how giving students “low-stakes quizzes” could help improve their memory as well as consistent and spread out practice. Psychology In Action, written by both Karen Huffman and Katherine Dowdell, also restates similar learning techniques within their first chapter.

In classrooms all across America, students sit perched over their desks in the process of taking standardized tests. As the students take the tests, teachers pace nervously up and down the rows of their classroom, hoping and praying that their students can recall the information which they have presented. Some children sit relaxed at their desks, calmly filling in the bubbles and answering essay questions. These children are well prepared and equipped to handle their tests. Other children, however, sit hunched over their desks, pondering over questions, trying to guess an answer. They struggle to recall information that has been covered many times in class, but they can’t.

Utilizing standardized tests as a tool to test the knowledge of students outlines only a small portion of an individual's performance and creativity. The environment of the situation, creates an immense amount of stressors, such as time limits, the anxieties of doing well, or the endless pressures that the test can determine a student's future. Each individual comes with vast amounts of different abilities in which a single test cannot possibly account for all. Although the tests attempt to provide an evaluation of the student’s test taking skills, many students are smart, but it simply doesn’t show on the test due to the unaccountable external forces. In other words, there is an avoidance of the external forces, which limits the student’s proficiency because only the standard reading, math, and writing become strictly tested upon. One external force which hinders performance is that standardized testing evaluates a student’s efficiency only on that particular day, which does not account for other performances throughout the student’s overall growth. Consecutively, the students face frightening outcomes and unrealistic intelligence techniques that regulates a student's

It is widely understood standardized tests could provide an outline on the subjects public schools need to focus on. However, as many students prepare for standardized tests, they find themselves memorizing the information rather than learning the necessities. Although students find themselves memorizing information, ninety-three percent of student studies show a positive effect on student achievement.

Standardized testing has become a common feature of Educational institutions on which they rely on to determine one’s academic achievements and future success. They are used to measure students’ academic achievements and are said to be reliable indicators of future academic success. However, these tests can be unrealistic indicators a student’s true Academic abilities. Students are at a disadvantage if they suffer from Performance Anxiety; a medical condition from which many student’s suffer. Memorizing the test material and cheating allow scores to be inflated without proper understanding or knowledge on the topics.

This study takes a look at the benefits of frequent quizzing, and how it aids in both memory and attention when studying. The study also looks at the brain’s tendency to wander particularly during long periods of studying or lectures, lowering the amount of material being consumed. The quizzes are defined by the study as low stakes tests that allow students to review material, whether given by a professor or when studying out of class.

Moreover, it must be well-aligned to the material being taught. Like homework, it must be promptly scored and returned to students so that they can correct any mistakes or thinking errors before they become ingrained in their minds. Research shows that, “students who test frequently and are given prompt feedback have positive attitudes toward testing. They regard tests as facilitating learning, studying, and providing effective feedback(Cotton, 1988).”

This study was conducted on a college campus, where students are routinely expected to recall when tested on previous lecture material. As explained by Bartlett (1932), there is a difference in how memories are formed and retrieved. If the student has not committed the information to memory, it can easily be altered if there is pressure placed on the student to recall.

Therefore, the argument about seeing what the student has learned, doesn’t work. Students study everything they already forgot to be able to take a test in order to pass that semester, than forget it all over again. Semester tests are tests at the end of each semester testing students on all the subjects they have learned in that portion of the year. They are twenty percent of student’s whole semester grade.Twenty percent of a grade puts a lot of stress on students and having to grade everything puts a lot of stress on teachers as well. There are lots of really intelligent students that are not very good at testing.

“If the material in the tests is anticipated and becomes the basis for study, then the results tell us only about the level of prep work and nothing else” (Tanner 4). The results no longer offer valuable insight into students’ academic lives, they merely display how well teachers prepared them for the test.

In the results provided in the journal, we see that in the free recall testing, the use of the 3R method was more successful across the board than those who used note taking or rereading as their study strategy. The results of the students who used the note-taking strategy and the rereading strategy were not as significant as students using the 3R strategy.

There are many steps in the process of remembering information to be recalled when taking the exam. The first step is for the information from our textbook must be encoded to be able to be stored in the brain and recalled from the short-term and long-term memory. A memory is encoded through our perceptions based on our senses, attention and emotions creating sensations. These sensations are then decoded in the sensory areas of the cortex and are then combined as one memory in the hippocampus. These memories are then passed on to our short-term memory where the information will stay for a short amount of time. Your short term memory can only hold 7-9 pieces of information for no longer than 20 seconds. After these 20 seconds these short term

One topic that I found rather interesting was in chapter 6 Long-term Memory: Structure called Recognition Memory. "Recognition memory is the identification of a stimulus that was encountered earlier." (Goldstein, 2015, p. 158). According to the textbook when measuring recognition memory, where a person will be conferred a motive during a period of time and then again will be conferred the same motive later, as well as other alternatives that the person was not conferred to in the beginning, similar to studying for a multiple-choice exam (Goldstein, 2015, p. 158). I think we all as college students can relate to recognition memory regarding all of the tests, quizzes, papers, and final exams we have to take. When we study for a test we have to

this sounds counterintuitive because, essentially by studying less, you can actually learn more. Of course, one reason why testing is not a popular studying technique is because testing is often regarded as the evil of education. Paradoxically, it is just this difficulty that makes them such effective study tools, research suggests. Rereading information often gives the false impression that you are learning the material because the task itself does not take much work to do. Students often reread materials to study, almost as if they expect the information will seep into their brains just as syrup seeps into the cavities of a waffle. The more mental sweat it takes to dig out the information, the more securely it will be subsequently anchored. Practice testing is an informal kind of testing in which you can assess your own learning performance. It is informal compared to exams, so it has no far-reaching consequences. You can practice testing in any form such as using flashcards, doing problems at the ends of textbook chapters or taking the practice tests that professors often post prior to the exam. Unlike many of the other study techniques, the benefits of practice testing are not modest – studies have found that a practice test can double free recall! These two principles (spacing and testing) can be combined to potentially maximize the benefits – i.e. practice with a set of flashcards on Day 1, again on Day 3 and then again on Day 5, etc. ELABORATE ON MORE WAYS TO