Study title

The project concerns the effect of an unsuccessful pre-test (effectively a guess), on the subsequent learning of information, relative to studying that information with no-initial guess. The focus of the work has been the development of a theoretical understanding of when pre-testing is or is not beneficial to subsequent learning, with a view to developing applications of the technique to educational practice. Consequently, each experiment compared the effects of studying versus guessing (and receiving feedback to study) on subsequent memory for the material, with each experiment varying in other aspects (e.g. the nature of the material, or nature of the final test). A total of 26 experimental studies have been completed. Thirteen of these experiments have been published in four outputs and for each of these, the relevant data are published in Open Science Framework (OSF) repositories, as detailed below. A further 6 studies form parts of papers that are either under review, or have been reported at conferences (or both). The remaining studies have not yet been output, but are included in manuscripts in preparation. OSF repositories for the unpublished work will be made available upon acceptance for publication. All data were collected from volunteer participants who were either undergraduates participating for partial course credit, or members of the public who received a small financial payment. Prior to March 2019 all work was completed in person at the University of Plymouth, but thereafter we moved to online testing using Prolific due to the impact of the global pandemic. Output 1 examines the impact of pre-testing on different aspects of the event, tested through different criterion memory tests across 5 experiments. The main conclusion from this output is that pre-testing boosts availability of targets (measured through recognition), but not cue-target associations (measured through recall, or associative recognition). Output 2 tested potential accounts...