Psychological Development and Education ›› 2014, Vol. 30 ›› Issue (6): 609-615.

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Cue Strength Regulating the Testing Effect:The Differences between Different Testing Intervals

ZHENG Jun, ZHANG Wei, LUO Liang   

  1. State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875
  • Online:2014-11-15 Published:2014-11-15

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Abstract: The testing effect refers to the fact that in comparsion to restudy, involvment in the testing enhances long-term retention. The current study had 126 subjects, and adopted Chinese words pairs with different cue strength (strong/weak) as experimental materials. The experiment was designed to explore how learning methods (restudy/testing) influencing the memory retention on different testing intervals (5 minutes/2 days). The results indicated that:(1) memory of target words with strong cues showed the main effect of learning methods:the target performance in testing group was higher than restudy group. (2) In the situation of weak cues, the main effect of learning methods wasn't significant, but there was an interaction between learning methods and testing intervals:there was no significant difference between the immediate recall of restudy and testing group, however, the performance of testing group was significant higher than restudy group two days later. In conclusion, these results demonstrated that cue strength regulating the testing effect, which supports the elaborative retrieval hypothesis

Key words: cue strength, testing effect, long-term memory, elaborative retrieval hypothesis, conceptual organization

CLC Number: 

  • G442
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