The impact of formative testing on study behaviour and study performance of (bio)medical students: a smartphone application intervention study.

BACKGROUND: Formative testing can increase knowledge retention but students often underuse available opportunities. Applying modern technology to make the formative tests more attractive for students could enhance the implementation of formative testing as a learning tool. This study aimed to determine whether formative testing using an internet-based application ("app") can positively affect study behaviour as well as study performance of (bio)medical students. METHODS: A formative testing app "Physiomics, to the next level" was introduced during a 4-week course to a large cohort (n = 461) of Dutch first year (bio)medical students of the Radboud University. The app invited students to complete 7 formative tests throughout the course. Each module was available for 3-4 days to stimulate the students to distribute their study activities throughout the 4-week course. RESULTS: 72% of the students used the app during the course. Study time significantly increased in intensive users (p < 0.001), while no changes were observed in moderate (p = 0.07) and non-users (p = 0.25). App-users obtained significantly higher grades during the final exam of the course (p < 0.05). Non-users more frequently failed their final exam (34%, OR 3.6, 95% CI: 2.0-6.4) compared to moderate users (19%) and intensive users (12%). Students with an average grade <6.5 during previous courses benefitted most from the app, as intensive (5.8 ± 0.9 / 36%) and moderate users (5.8 ± 0.9 / 33%) obtained higher grades and failed their exam less frequently compared to non-users (5.2 ± 1.1 / 61%). The app was also well appreciated by students; students scored the app with a grade of 7.3 ± 1.0 out of 10 and 59% of the students indicated that they would like the app to be implemented in future courses. CONCLUSIONS: A smartphone-based application of formative testing is an effective and attractive intervention to stimulate study behaviour and improve study performance in (bio) medical students

Adaptive memory: Stereotype activation is not enough

Studies have shown that survival processing leads to superior memorability. The aim of the present study was to examine whether this survival recall advantage might result from stereotype activation. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a pilot study and two experiments in which participants were primed with stereotypes (Experiment 1, professor and elderly person; Experiment 2, survival-stereotype). In Experiment 1, 120 undergraduates were randomly assigned to a survival, professor stereotype, elderly person stereotype, or moving scenario and rated words for their relevance to the imagined scenario. In Experiment 2, 75 undergraduates were given a survival, survival-stereotype (based on our pilot study), or moving scenario. Both experiments showed that survival processing leads to a greater recall advantage over the stereotype groups and control group. These data indicate that the mere activation of stereotypes cannot explain the survival recall advantage

Survival processing in times of stress

Recent studies have found that processing information according to an evolutionary relevant (i.e., survival) scenario improves its subsequent memorability, potentially as a result of fitness advantages gained in the ancestral past. So far, research has not revealed much about any proximate mechanisms that might underlie this so-called survival processing advantage in memory. Intriguingly, research has shown that the memorability of stressful situations is enhanced via the release of stress hormones acting on brain regions involved in memory. Since survival situations habitually involve some degree of stress, in the present study, we investigated whether stress serves as a proximate mechanism to promote survival processing. Participants rated words for their relevance to either a survival or a neutral (moving) scenario after they had been exposed to a psychosocial stressor or a no-stress control condition. Surprise retention tests immediately following the rating task revealed that survival processing and acute stress independently boosted memory performance. These results therefore suggest that stress does not serve as a proximate mechanism of the survival processing advantage in memory

The Effect of Testing on the Retention of Coherent and Incoherent Text Material

Research has shown that testing during learning can enhance the long-term retention of text material. In two experiments, we investigated the testing effect with a fill-in-the-blank test on the retention of text material. In Experiment 1, using a coherent text, we found no retention benefit of testing compared to a restudy (control) condition. In Experiment 2, text coherence was disrupted by scrambling the order of the sentences from the text. The material was subsequently presented as a list of facts as opposed to connected discourse. For the incoherent version of the text, testing slowed down the rate of forgetting compared to a restudy (control) condition. The results suggest that the connectedness of materials can play an important role in determining the magnitude of testing benefits for long-term retention. Testing with a completion test seems most beneficial for unconnected materials and less so for highly structured materials

Memory for medication side effects in younger and older adults: the role of subjective and objective importance

Older adults often experience memory impairments, but can sometimes use selective processing and schematic support to remember important information. The current experiments investigate to what degree younger and healthy older adults remember medication side effects that were subjectively or objectively important to remember. Participants studied a list of common side effects, and rated how negative these effects were if they were to experience them, and were then given a free recall test. In Experiment 1, the severity of the side effects ranged from mild (e.g., itching) to severe (e.g., stroke), and in Experiment 2, certain side effects were indicated as critical to remember (i.e., “contact your doctor if you experience this”). There were no age differences in terms of free recall of the side effects, and older adults remembered more severe side effects relative to mild effects. However, older adults were less likely to recognize critical side effects on a later recognition test, relative to younger adults. The findings suggest that older adults can selectively remember medication side effects, but have difficulty identifying familiar but potentially critical side effects, and this has implications for monitoring medication use in older age

Major memory for microblogs

Online social networking is vastly popular and permits its members to post their thoughts as microblogs, an opportunity that people exploit, on Facebook alone, over 30 million times an hour. Such trivial ephemera, one might think, should vanish quickly from memory; conversely, they may comprise the sort of information that our memories are tuned to recognize, if that which we readily generate, we also readily store. In the first two experiments, participants' memory for Facebook posts was found to be strikingly stronger than their memory for human faces or sentences from books-a magnitude comparable to the difference in memory strength between amnesics and healthy controls. The second experiment suggested that this difference is not due to Facebook posts spontaneously generating social elaboration, because memory for posts is enhanced as much by adding social elaboration as is memory for book sentences. Our final experiment, using headlines, sentences, and reader comments from articles, suggested that the remarkable memory for microblogs is also not due to their completeness or simply their topic, but may be a more general phenomenon of their being the largely spontaneous and natural emanations of the human mind.</p