Many individuals from these three group ages participate in lifelong learning outside the traditional university or college setting, training programs and advancement in career. In the US, 53 percent of younger adults and 38 percent of the older adults took part in some form of lifelong learning. This shows that lifetime learning is common. The surprising fact is that still very little is known about making learning better in populations other than the ones used in traditional college and university settings because of convenience with which university students can be examined. This leaves many issues unclear if we were to use those results to generalize for the whole population. However, learning techniques including testing should be examined in the younger population to determine their efficiency in a more realistic way.
Research shows that testing helps in improving long-term learning in the younger college population. It enables students to have a good long-term memory. This means that they will do better on later tests if they had been tested on the same subject before. This is better compared to restudying a subject that only causes short-term retention. This effect of testing only considers the traditional college student and is mum on whether it helps the middle aged and old learners too.
On the benefits of testing to non-university students, we cannot generalize the effects to learners who are not in college. This is because people who are not frequently tested may react erratically to the use of tests as a learning tool. This is because they are not used to them and have major anxieties when taking them. They may also not perform well because of difficulty in getting the relevant knowledge needed for the test. However, this does not mean that tests are not important.
In older adults, testing benefits of long-term learning are marred by uncertainty because of the poor long-term memory of older adults. They are likely to have poor initial memory and, therefore, have limited elaborative processing. Research has shown that there is a proportional relation between initial memory power and benefits achieved from testing. Thus, the older generation is likely to benefit less by starting out with poor performance.
In conclusion, younger students will outperform the middle aged and the older in memory tests. However all the three groups benefit more from testing as compared to restudying materials on delayed tests? This means that it not only helps different groups but also helps them almost in a similar way. Even inexperienced learners can benefit and make gains through testing. Although the initial performance of the middle aged and the older individuals is lower than that of younger college adults, both groups benefit from testing as much as the younger generation in college. This is with the assumption that there is a control for intelligence between the three groups. Though the use of testing has been used to examine young students, this research proves that teachers can use tests across the whole population to impart knowledge. The population will include middle aged and the older generation. Testing benefits the non-traditional students by enabling them to improve their long-term learning. Testing can also help the younger, and the middle aged to gain new life skills, which they can use in their careers, or even to venture into new fields.
References
Meyer, A., & Logan, J. (2013). Taking the Testing Effect Beyond the College Freshman: Benefits for Lifelong Learning. Psychology and Aging. Advance online, doi: 10.1037/a0030890.
