Medical school curriculum integrates pre-clinical coursework with clinical experiences to impart understanding of pathophysiologic processes and requisite skills for future physicians. Evaluation through examinations measures students' knowledge and skills acquisition, while practice exam questions remain underexplored in studies on student study…

Critical thinking is a multifaceted construct involving a set of skills and affective dispositions together with self-regulation. The aim of this study was to explore how self-regulation and effort in test-taking contribute to undergraduate students' performance in critical thinking assessment. The data were collected in 18 higher education…

The authors' institution exceeded the Texas Science of Teaching Reading (STR) exam's passing rate of 86.6% for the 2021-2022 academic year. The authors think this success was largely due to conducting an analysis of test questions and helping preservice teachers better prepare for the exam. The authors helped preservice teachers supplement the…

The basis for mastering neurophysiology is understanding ion movement across cell membranes. The Electrochemical Gradients Assessment Device (EGAD) is a 17-item test assessing students' understanding of fundamental concepts of neurophysiology, e.g., electrochemical gradients and resistance, synaptic transmission, and stimulus strength. We…

Student drop-out is one of the most critical issues that higher educational institutions face nowadays. The problem is significant for first-year students. These freshmen are especially at risk of failing due to the transition from different educational settings at high school. Thanks to the massive boom of Information and Communication…

The testing effect refers to the gains in learning and retention that result from taking practice tests before the final test. Understanding the conditions under which practice tests improve learning is crucial, so four experiments were conducted with a total of 438 undergraduate students in Turkey. In the first study, students who took graded…

Due to the rigor and pace of undergraduate medical anatomy courses, it is not uncommon for students to struggle and fail initially. However, repetition of coursework places an additional burden on the student, instructor, and institution. The purpose of this study was to compare the exam preparation strategies of repeating and non-repeating…

Students who experience mathematics anxiety have long been suggested to engage in avoidance behaviors that negatively impact their mathematics performance. However, little is known about how these avoidance behaviors manifest for highly anxious students within the context of a mathematics course. Since the use of effortful study strategies has…

Taking tests can trigger multiple emotions. To regulate emotions we might experience during test-taking situations, strategies such as reappraisal and suppression are often used. This study aimed to investigate if college students' cultural values affect their emotion regulation in test-taking situations. The sample included 298 college students.…

The current study examined whether the learning benefits of pretesting--like those produced by posttesting--generalize to classroom settings, and whether such benefits transfer to non-pretested related information. Before some lectures but not others, undergraduate students enrolled in a large research methods class were given a brief competitive…

Two-stage testing (TST) involves individual testing followed by taking the same test in teams. Previously, Vogler and Robinson ("The Journal of Experimental Education," 84(4), 787-803, 2016) found that TST facilitated individual performance. The present study addressed methodological limitations in the Vogler and Robinson study in two…

The present study examined the processing and performance of examinees in reading comprehension (RC) tests, when they read the whole text "prior" to its questions ("text-first" strategy [TFs]) compared to reading the text "while" and "for" answering the questions ("questions-first" strategy [QFs]).…

Introduction: Academic stress is a major problem in higher education and can be a risk factor for future academic and mental health problems. Programs to reduce it have focused on psychological interventions (mindfulness, cognitive-behavioral therapy, etc.), ignoring interventions focused on promoting study and learning skills. High academic…

Assessments are common in undergraduate classrooms, with formats including multiple-choice and open-ended (in which the students must generate their own answers) questions. While much is known about the strategies that students use when taking multiple-choice questions, there has yet to be a study evaluating the strategies that students employ…

While the effect of reading strategies on L2 test performance has been extensively researched, the effect of test-taking strategies remains underexplored, with mixed results due to varying contextual factors. This study, therefore, investigated the latent structure of test-taking strategies and the relationships among test-taking strategies,…