The Testing Effect for Learning Principles and Procedures from Texts

The authors explored whether a testing effect occurs not only for retention of facts but also for application of principles and procedures. For that purpose, 38 high school students either repeatedly studied a text on probability calculations or studied the text, took a test on the content, restudied the text, and finally took the test a second time. Results show that testing not only leads to better retention of facts than restudying, but also to better application of acquired knowledge (i.e., principles and procedures) in high school statistics. In other words, testing seems not only to benefit fact retention, but also positively affects deeper learning.

Classifying Written Texts Through Rhythmic Features

Rhythm analysis of written texts focuses on literary analysis and it mainly considers poetry. In this paper we investigate the relevance of rhythmic features for categorizing texts in prosaic form pertaining to different genres. Our contribution is threefold. First, we define a set of rhythmic features for written texts. Second, we extract these features from three corpora, of speeches, essays, and newspaper articles. Third, we perform feature selection by means of statistical analyses, and determine a subset of features which efficiently discriminates between the three genres. We find that using as little as eight rhythmic features, documents can be adequately assigned to a given genre with an accuracy of around 80 %, significantly higher than the 33 % baseline which results from random assignment.