Introduction
Study & Recall
The first score is a baseline, not a verdict.
You open a new chapter, see a subject you barely know and do the sensible-looking thing: start reading from the top.
Pretesting asks you to do something less comfortable first.
Before the explanation, try to answer a few questions about the material. You may get most of them wrong. That is not a broken study session. It is the starting measurement.
Used properly, a pretest can show you where your knowledge stops, give you useful questions to carry into the lesson and make parts of the later material easier to notice. It is one practical version of Study & Recall’s Fail First step: attempt, reveal the gaps, then study with better information.
It is not a magic trick, and the first score is not a judgement on you. The useful part is what happens next.
What is pretesting before studying?
Pretesting means attempting questions before you study the answers.
That makes it different from a normal practice test at the end of a topic. A post-study test asks what survived the learning. A pretest asks what is already available before the learning begins.
The same question can do both jobs at different times:
The first attempt gives you a baseline. The later attempt tells you whether anything changed.
Does getting the answer wrong really help?
Sometimes — when the failed attempt is followed by the correct information and later retrieval.
In laboratory studies, Kornell and colleagues found that trying and failing to retrieve an answer before studying it could improve later memory compared with study alone. Richland, Kornell and Kao found a pretesting benefit for information targeted by questions in experiments using an educational text. A later review by Pan and Carpenter concluded that prequestioning and pretesting often improve learning, while also stressing that the size and reach of the effect vary with the procedure and the final test.
Those findings do not mean every wrong answer automatically becomes learning. They mean an initial attempt can improve the learning that follows under the right conditions.
Researchers have proposed several explanations. A question may direct attention towards the answer when it appears. The attempt may activate related knowledge. It may also create curiosity or make the gap more noticeable. The exact mix is still debated, so there is no need to pretend one neat mechanism explains every result.
The practical conclusion is narrower: an attempted question can prepare you to learn, but only if you then meet, check and retrieve the correct material.
Pretesting is not the same as active recall after learning
Both involve producing an answer without looking, but they answer different questions.
Pretesting asks: what can I produce before this round of study?
Active recall afterwards asks: what can I still produce now that I have studied it?
That distinction matters. If you only pretest, you have a list of gaps but no evidence that you repaired them. If you only test afterwards, you miss the useful baseline and the chance to make your gaps visible before you read.
The complete loop is:
Pretest → check → study → retrieve → retest.
1. Set a clear scope
Choose one lesson, chapter or tightly defined skill. “Cyber security” is too broad. “How salted password hashes are stored and attacked” is workable.
A clear scope stops the first attempt becoming a random quiz about everything you have ever forgotten.
2. Choose a small diagnostic set
Use five to eight representative questions as a practical starting point. That range is a workflow suggestion, not a magic number established by the research.
The questions should sample the kinds of performance the topic requires. Include more than definitions. Ask for an explanation, a comparison, an application or a sequence where appropriate.
If a course already supplies learning objectives or practice questions, use them. If it does not, turn the lesson headings into questions without reading the answers beneath them.
3. Answer closed-book
Close the lesson, notes and search results. Write or say an answer from memory.
“I don’t know” is a valid answer. It is cleaner evidence than opening a second tab and quietly turning the pretest into research.
Do not spend twenty minutes wrestling with one item. Make a genuine attempt, capture what you think, then move on.
4. Mark the kind of gap
A single percentage hides useful differences. Label each response:
Add a confidence score from 0 to 10 if it helps. A confident wrong answer deserves attention because it is easy to carry forward unnoticed. A low-confidence correct answer deserves another retrieval attempt because you may not be able to reproduce it reliably.
5. Study the whole scoped lesson
Use the pretest to direct attention, not to declare unasked material irrelevant.
When an answer appears, compare it with what you wrote. Ask exactly what was missing or confused. Then continue through the rest of the lesson. Pretesting can sharpen focus, but a handful of questions cannot represent every important idea in a chapter.
6. Retest without the material open
Return to the questions after studying. Produce the answers again rather than rereading your corrections.
Compare the second attempt with the first:
That comparison is the evidence. “I finished the chapter” is activity. “I can now explain the role of a salt and why a fast hash is a poor password-storage choice” is a learning result you can inspect.
A worked pretesting example
Imagine the next lesson covers password storage.
Before opening it, you attempt these questions:
Your first pass looks like this:
That is already more useful than “password security feels a bit fuzzy”.
During the lesson, you pay particular attention to unique salts, password-specific slow hashing functions and the verification flow. You still study the material that was not named in the five questions. Afterwards, you close the lesson and answer the same set again.
If question 2 is now accurate but question 4 is still hand-wavy, the next study action is obvious. You do not need to reread the entire chapter. Check the weak explanation, then retrieve it again.
A grade
You have not studied the topic yet. Treating the first score like an exam result makes no sense and encourages you to choose easy questions.
A high-stakes gamble
Do not use the actual assessed exam as your casual first look where attempts are limited or consequences are real. Use low-stakes practice questions or write your own diagnostic set.
A hunt for obscure trivia
The questions should represent what you need to understand or do. Missing an edge-case fact may matter later, but it should not crowd out the central model.
Failure without feedback
A wrong answer followed by nothing is just a wrong answer. You need the correct explanation, worked solution or reliable feedback afterwards.
Permission to ignore everything else
Information that was not pretested can still matter. Study the scoped material, using the questions as attention guides rather than blinkers.
When pretesting is most useful
Pretesting is especially practical when:
It is less useful when the scope is so unfamiliar that you cannot form meaningful questions, when no reliable answer is available, or when the activity becomes longer than the learning it was meant to guide.
Start small. The method should reveal the work, not become another project to administer. When an answer does become accurate, bring it back later through spaced repetition rather than assuming one good attempt settles it.
The first score is a baseline, not a verdict
Pretesting changes the opening question of a study session.
Instead of “What page should I read first?”, you ask “What can I already produce, and where does it break?”
Then you study with those gaps visible. Afterwards, you retrieve again and compare.
Getting questions wrong at the start is not the goal. Finding out what the wrong answers were hiding — and proving that you can now do better — is the goal.
That is Fail First in useful form: no performance theatre, no punishment, just better information about what to learn next.
Research behind pretesting
These sources are useful starting points for the claims above. They support a qualified benefit, not a promise that every pretest works in every setting.
• Kornell, Hays & Bjork (2009), Unsuccessful retrieval attempts enhance subsequent learning
• Richland, Kornell & Kao (2009), The pretesting effect
• Pan & Carpenter (2023), Prequestioning and pretesting effects: a review of empirical research, theoretical perspectives, and implications for educational practice
Run a Fail First pretest
Start with a question, capture the gap, study what you missed and retest it. Study & Recall keeps that before-and-after learning loop in one place.