Who benefits from practice testing? (Schwerter et al., 2025)

Having just written about desirable difficulties yesterday, this Schwerter et al. (2025) article on “Differential use and effectiveness of practice testing: Who benefits and who engages?” fits the theme perfectly.

In a nutshell, they find that practice testing (in a study on 325 students in an undergraduate maths class) improves performance on the final exam (higher grades and pass rate) for everybody, independent of the results of the practice tests. The number of practice testing opportunities that students engaged in was a stronger predictor of exam results than prior academic history. But practice testing seems to be more beneficial for already high-performing students, whereas the less-high-performing students need more repeated practice testing and a minimum level of performance to benefit equally: “retrieval practice is not automatically effective for all learners. Its benefits depend on both readiness and sufficient engagement. For lower-achieving students, repeated exposure to quizzes can serve as a remedial scaffold, but only if participation is sufficiently frequent and performance exceeds a minimal level“.

But lower-achieving students do not necessarily engage without incentives (like e.g. bonus points), and it seems that a threshold level of interest in the course is needed to maintain the motivation to engage in practice testing and expose oneself to those “desirable difficulties”, and especially a mastery approach to learning seems to help sustain that motivation.

Schwerter et al. (2025) recommend three interventions to make sure that low-achieving students utilise practice testing:

1. integrating practice testing into the course (e.g. as online quizzes)
2. enhancing intrinsic motivation (the authors don’t actually make any suggestions for how to do that)
3. promoting mastery-approach goals and self-regulated learning (again no suggestions for how to do that)

How exactly to do 2. and 3. of course depends on context, but generally thinking about self-determination and scaffolding for transfer of extrinsic to intrinsic motivation (to avoid vicious circles of more and more rewards being expected) seem like a good start. In any case, this article is a good reminder that learning requires repeated practice, and that we should somehow build that into instruction.

Schwerter, J., Lauermann, F., Brahm, T., & Murayama, K. (2025). Differential use and effectiveness of practice testing: Who benefits and who engages?. Learning and Individual Differences, 123, 102761.

Featured image from this morning’s swim!