Although the memorial benefits of testing are well established empirically, the mechanisms underlying this benefit are not well understood. The authors evaluated the mediator shift hypothesis, which states that test-restudy practice is beneficial for memory because retrieval failures during practice allow individuals to evaluate the effectiveness…

Learners typically allocate more resources to learning items that are higher in value than they do to items lower in value. For instance, when items vary in point value for learning, participants allocate more study time to the higher point items than they do to the lower point items. The current experiments extend this research to a context where…

The literature on testing effects is vast but supports surprisingly few prescriptive conclusions for how to schedule practice to achieve both durable and efficient learning. Key limitations are that few studies have examined the effects of initial learning criterion or the effects of relearning, and no prior research has examined the combined…