Classroom pretesting improves high-stakes exam performance on pretested content by 8–9% over a multi-week course¶
Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · reviewr3·q3
Currency · newest study 2023 · checked against its sources 2026-10-14 (automated, 1 of 1 entry) · not reviewed by a person
Subclaims¶
Reading the evidence codes
q is the design tier, i the impact, n the sample, and the kind with its r
the rigour judged within that kind: what each code means.
This claim: no standardized effect is recorded in observations/ for it yet, so no benchmark reading is possible.
q3 i? Students who took multiple-choice pretests at the start of lectures performed 8–9% better on final exam questions addressing pretested content (as reported by the review). → Steven C. Pan 2023
Evidence¶
Steven C. Pan 2023¶
Steven C. Pan, Shana K. Carpenter. (2023). Prequestioning and Pretesting Effects: a Review of Empirical Research, Theoretical Perspectives, and Implications for Educational Practice. Educational Psychology Review. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-023-09814-5
q3 · i? · review · r3
Narrative review of Soderstrom and Bjork (2023), a 10-week undergraduate research methods course with pen-and-paper pretests and no feedback; the review reports students "performed 8–9% better on questions addressing content that had been previously pretested".
"On a high-stakes final exam administered at the end of the course, students performed 8–9% better on questions addressing content that had been previously pretested"
Discussion¶
Related Claims¶
- Classroom testing (quizzing) significantly boosts student academic achievement to a medium extent (g = 0.499). — the general claim this finding bears on, with the studies behind it
- Pretesting enhances learning — a broader claim this one bears on
- Classroom quizzing delivered by clickers, computer software, or paper improves student performance on classroom exams in middle school and college courses — related
- Requiring students to write out evaluation steps manually improved transfer to pen-and-paper exam performance between the two deployments — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
- A review reports that pretesting helps paired-associate learning only when correct-answer feedback is immediate, but helps trivia-fact learning even when feedback is delayed up to 24 hours — related
- The study addresses whether performance on the low-stakes PISA reading and mathematics assessments can be fostered by coaching and pretesting — related
Page metadata
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
type |
claim |
id |
classroom-pretesting-exam-gains |
title |
Classroom pretesting improves high-stakes exam performance on pretested content by 8–9% over a multi-week course |
description |
Classroom pretesting improves high-stakes exam performance on pretested content by 8–9% over a multi-week course |
status |
review |
evidence_strength |
moderate |
newest_evidence |
2023 |
source_checked |
2026-10-14 |
generated |
by process:wiki-ingest on 2026-10-13 |
trust |
unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content |
sources |
1 — steven-c-pan-2023 |
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