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Guessing as a learning intervention: A meta-analytic review of the prequestion effect

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Abstract

Giving students test questions before they have learned the correct answers (i.e., prequestions) enhances learning. However, existing research has provided conflicting evidence on whether the benefits of prequestions are specific to the initially tested material or if they generalize to new, nontested material. In this review, we summarize the literature on the prequestion effect, describe the attention-based account underlying this effect, report a meta-analysis of the magnitude of the specific and general effects, and explore theoretically and empirically relevant moderator variables that influence the size and direction of the prequestion effect. This preregistered meta-analysis demonstrated a moderate specific effect (g = 0.54, k = 97) but a virtually nonexistent general effect (g = 0.04, k = 91). Overall, the attention-based account received support from some theoretically relevant moderator analyses. Future researchers are encouraged to conduct theoretically motivated studies to help clarify the mechanisms that underlie the attention-enhancing effects of prequestions and to explore the benefits of prequestions in educational domains to establish the extent to which these effects translate into the classroom.

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Data Availability

All data and analysis scripts for this study was included on the OSF page listed in the Method section of this paper.

Notes

  1. An additional paradigm that bears resemblance to the PE is the interpolated testing paradigm, during which participants learn, say, two sets of materials, and between the encoding of these two sets of materials they either answer some (post)questions or they complete some filler tasks. In general, answering interpolated questions promotes learning of the later set of materials (e.g., Ahn & Chan, in press, 2022; Chan et al., 2020, 2022; Manley & Chan, 2019; Wilford et al., 2014).

  2. We selected 2006 as the year to split the data given that the present era of prequestion research arguably coincided with the advent of interest in educationally relevant memory phenomena, which occurred in the mid-2000s.

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Author note

This paper is based on the dissertation of Kyle St. Hilaire at Iowa State University. Kyle St. Hilaire is now at Chegg, Inc. This work is partly supported by the National Science Foundation Science of Learning and Augmented Intelligence Grant 2017333.

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    Kyle J. St. Hilaire, Jason C. K. Chan & Dahwi Ahn

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St. Hilaire, K.J., Chan, J.C.K. & Ahn, D. Guessing as a learning intervention: A meta-analytic review of the prequestion effect. Psychon Bull Rev (2023). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-023-02353-8

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