The benefits of quizzing in content-focused versus skills-focused courses.

Abstract

We examined the effect of quiz type (graded, ungraded, and no quiz) on cumulative final exam performance across content-focused courses (Introductory Psychology, Intro, and Cognitive Psychology, Cog), and a skills-focused course (Research Methods and Statistics, RMS). We predicted that quizzing would produce a larger benefit for the content-focused courses than the skills-focused course because of the different peda-gogical styles associated with the courses. We also predicted that students completing ungraded pop quizzes would benefit more than students completing graded pop quizzes because the anxiety felt about pop quizzing would mitigate the positive impact of active retrieval. Our results were consistent with these predictions. These results increase our understanding of the roles of active retrieval and anxiety in student performance.