The Pretesting Process

What if as you were leaving for school one morning your mom or dad said to you "Hope you fail your test today!" Something about that just doesn't sound right. Well it actually does. Studies are proving that if you take a pretest before each unit and fail that test you will be more successful on the final exam. You will now be able to use the pretest as a base for the entire unit. It can prepare you for what's about to come. You learn to understand the pretest. 

At U.C.L.A. psychologist Elizabeth Ligon Bjork and Nicholas Soderstrom tested this theory in a live classroom. They gave a pretest to each of their students prior to teaching a lesson. Most students failed the pretest as expected. The students received the correct answers for that test in a reasonable amount of time after they've taken them. This is because studies show that the most improvement is when students aren't waiting too long to be given the right answers. Bjork and Soderstrom created the final exam by combining it with questions that were related to the questions on the pretests and questions that were not. The results: students scored 10 percent higher on questions that they were familiar with than on questions they weren't. 

Growing up I was taught that failing a test is something that you don't want to happen to you. I was taught to strive for an A that is why failing a test is something that doesn't sit well with me. However, if teachers giving pretests with the intention of students failing becomes a popular way of teaching I have to wonder if I would be okay with failing my pretest? I would only be okay with failing under one circumstance: if the pretest did not count towards my final grade in the class. This is something that was not covered in the article I read, and it leaves me questioning why they did not talk about it. Was it because it is not something that you must or you must not do in order for this process to work? Was it because it depends on the individual teacher? All I know is that if I were in a class using this pretesting process I would hope that it did not affect my final grade. I feel that by having this process implemented into schools without having it affect final grades would benefit everyone’s learning. As Benedict Carey of The New York Times says 'We fail, but we fail forward'.