You Will be Tested on This

By DAVID GLENN

Researchers are dusting off an old insight: To maximize classroom learning, quiz early and often

In the late 1930s, an ambitious graduate student named Herbert F. Spitzer asked thousands of Iowa sixth graders to read a short article about bamboo — an article he later described as "highly factual, authentic, of the proper difficulty, and similar in type to the material that children read in their regular school work."

He divided the students into 10 groups and gave