Should Items and Answer Keys of Small-Scale Exams Be Published?

This study aimed to examine the effect of using items from previous exams on students’ pass-fail rates and on the psychometric properties of the tests and items. The study included data from 115 tests and 11,500 items used in the midterm and final exams of 3,910 students in the preclinical term at the Faculty of Medicine from 2014 to 2019. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics related to the total test scores, item difficulty and item discrimination values, and internal consistency values for reliability. The Shapiro-Wilks test was used to evaluate the distribution structure, and t test were used to analyze the differences between groups. The findings showed that the mean item repetition rate from 2014 to 2019 ranged from 16.98% to 39.00%. The total score variance decreased significantly as the percentage of test items increased. There was a significant, moderately positive relationship between the percentage of repeated test items and the number of students eligible to pass their grades. Item difficulty values obtained from initial item use were significantly lower than those obtained from repeated item use. We conclude that test items and answer keys should not be published by test makers unless they have the means such as the infrastructure, budget, and personnel to develop new items in place of the ones previously published in test banks.

Context Retrieval as a Critical Component in Selective Memory Retrieval

Selective retrieval often impairs recall of nonretrieved items, a finding referred to as retrieval-induced forgetting. In this article, I review recent research showing that selective retrieval can also improve recall of other items. This research points to a critical role of context retrieval in selective memory retrieval. The concept of context retrieval, which has played a prominent role in other lines of memory research, suggests that selective retrieval can reactivate the retrieved items’ temporal context during study, facilitating recall of other items that had a similar context at study. Such facilitatory effects on recall can arise both when selective item repetition occurs via retrieval and when it occurs via restudy, which suggests a link to the reminding literature. The findings offer new perspectives for investigating and understanding the effects of selective memory retrieval.

Pre-experimental stimulus familiarity modulates the effects of item repetition on source memory

Previous studies have reported contradictory findings regarding the effects of item repetition on the subsequent encoding of contextual details associated with items (i.e., source memory). Whereas some studies reported repetition-induced enhancement in source memory, other studies observed repetition-induced impairment. To resolve these conflicting results, we examined the modulatory role of pre-experimental stimulus familiarity in the relationship between item repetition and new source memory formation by orthogonally manipulating pre-experimental stimulus familiarity and intra-experimental item repetition. In a series of experiments consisting of three phases (item repetition, item-source association, and source memory test), we found that item repetition impaired source memory for pre-experimentally familiar items (famous faces or words), whereas the same manipulation improved source memory for pre-experimentally novel items (non-famous faces or pseudowords). Crucially, item repetition impaired, rather than improved, source memory for pre-experimentally novel items when these items had been pre-exposed to participants prior to the three-phase procedure. Collectively, these findings provide strong evidence that pre-experimental stimulus familiarity determines the relative costs and benefits of experimental item repetition on the encoding of new item-source associations. By demonstrating the interaction between different types of stimulus familiarity, the present findings advance our understanding of how prior experience affects the formation of new episodic memories. [Citation: Lee, H., Kim, K., & Yi, D-J. (in press). Pre-experimental stimulus familiarity modulates the effects of item repetition on source memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.]