The Pretesting Effect: Why Guessing Before You Learn Helps

Testing yourself after you study is well known as a strong study method. A less familiar idea goes one step further: try to answer questions about a topic before you have studied it at all. You will get most of them wrong. Two sets of experiments published in 2009 found that the attempt still helps you learn the material afterward.

1. The question researchers asked

Most research on testing looks at questions you can answer, where pulling the answer out of memory strengthens it. But what about a question you cannot answer yet? One possibility is that a failed attempt wastes time or even plants a wrong answer. Another is that the attempt prepares you to learn the right answer when you see it.

Two research teams tested this directly.

2. The vision essay experiments

Researchers Richland, Kornell, and Kao ran five experiments in which participants read an essay about vision. In the test condition, participants were asked about concepts from the essay before reading it. In the comparison condition, called extended study, participants did not get the pretest and instead had extra time to read the passage.

The researchers worried about an obvious alternative explanation: maybe pretest questions just tell you what to pay attention to. To rule that out, they emphasized the tested concepts in both conditions, using italics or bold keywords. In the fifth experiment, they went further and showed the questions to the comparison group without asking them to answer.

The result held across all five experiments. Posttest performance was better in the test condition than in the extended study condition. Most striking, the analysis included only items that participants had not answered correctly on the pretest. The benefit came from questions people got wrong.

3. The impossible questions experiments

A second team, Kornell, Hays, and Bjork, designed their materials so that participants could not succeed on the first try. In two experiments, they asked fictional general-knowledge questions, such as "What peace treaty ended the Calumet War?" There is no real answer to recall, so every attempt fails.

In four more experiments, participants saw a cue word, like "whale," and had to guess a weakly related target word, like "mammal." The rare trials where someone guessed correctly were excluded from the analysis.

In the test condition, participants tried to answer before being shown the answer. In the read-only condition, the question and answer appeared together. With both types of materials, the unsuccessful attempts enhanced learning. The authors suggested that taking challenging tests, instead of avoiding errors, may be one key to effective learning.

4. Why this matters for how you study

Many students read a chapter first and only test themselves at the end. These results suggest adding a short step at the start: try the questions before you read. Being wrong at that stage is not a problem. Both studies analyzed exactly the cases where people were wrong and still found a benefit.

5. How to use pretesting with a chapter

1. Find questions before you read. End-of-chapter questions, a review sheet, last year's quiz, or the learning objectives turned into questions all work.
2. Answer them in writing, quickly. Spend a minute or two. Guess when you do not know. Do not look anything up.
3. Read the chapter. You do not need to hunt for the answers, but you will likely notice them.
4. Check your guesses against the reading and correct them in a different color, so the right answer is the last thing you write.
5. Test yourself again later with the same questions, this time after studying.

For lectures, you can do the same with the slides or reading assigned beforehand: write quick guesses to a few questions before class.

6. Limits to keep in mind

Both papers were laboratory studies with specific materials: an essay about vision, invented trivia, and word pairs. The second study also showed participants the correct answer right after each attempt, so seeing the answer soon after guessing appears to be part of the method. If you pretest, make sure you check your answers in the same session rather than leaving wrong guesses uncorrected.

Pretesting is also a short warm-up, not a replacement for studying. It prepares you to learn from the reading; the reading and later review still do the main work.

7. Key takeaways

• Pretesting means answering questions about material before you have studied it.
• Across five experiments, people who were pretested on an essay remembered more than people given extra reading time, even on questions they missed at first.
• A second set of experiments using unanswerable or hard-to-guess questions also found that failed attempts improved later learning.
• Seeing the correct answer soon after guessing appears to be an important part of the method.
• A simple routine is to guess at chapter questions before reading, then correct your answers and retest later.