Restudying With the Quiz in Hand: When Correct-Answer Feedback is No Better Than Minimal Feedback

Quizzing (testing) can enhance students' metacognitive accuracy, restudy behaviors, and final test performance. Researchers have not examined, however, the effect of quiz feedback and the availability of the quiz during restudy on these indirect effects of quizzing. We examined three types of quiz feedback: correct-answer, right/wrong, and minimal. In Experiment 1, when the quiz and feedback were available during restudy, participants in all three conditions followed a discrepancy reduction study policy. There were no differences in final test performance in Experiment 1, implying that the degree of feedback elaboration did not impact learners' benefit from quizzing and restudy. In Experiment 2, when we retracted access to the quiz and feedback during restudy, restudy was impaired, and the minimal condition performed worse on the final test than the correct-answer condition. It appears that correct-answer feedback is critical if quizzes are unavailable; if they are available, the type of feedback has much less impact. General Audience Summary Quizzing (testing) can enhance students' later exam performance by directly strengthening one's memory for the information, and is often referred to as retrieval practice. Quizzing can also benefit students' understanding of what they do and do not know, especially when they are given feedback regarding which answers are correct or incorrect, and thereby increase the effectiveness of students' restudying. However, researchers have not examined how the nature of the quiz feedback and whether the presence of the quiz during restudy might affect restudy and performance on a final test. We examined three types of quiz feedback: correct-answer (i.e., if a question is incorrect, participants are given the correct answer), right/wrong (i.e., participants are only told whether a question is correct or incorrect), or minimal (i.e., participants are not given any feedback about individual questions, but are instead only given a score on the quiz, e.g., 34/40). In Experiment 1, when the quiz and feedback were available during a restudy period, participants in all three conditions were successfully able to focus their restudy on items answered incorrectly on the previous quiz. There were no differences in final test performance among conditions in Experiment 1, implying that the type of feedback did not impact learners' benefit from quizzing. In Experiment 2, when we took away the quiz and feedback during the restudy period, rest