Prequestioning Enhances Undergraduate Students Learning in an Environmental Chemistry Course

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that prequestioning, involving practice tests before instruction, significantly improves undergraduate students' learning outcomes in an environmental chemistry course, with large effect sizes observed.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that prequestioning enhances learning in real classroom settings, extending previous laboratory findings to authentic educational environments.

Findings

Significant improvement in test performance on prequestioned concepts

Large overall effect size (Cohen's d = 2.04, p < .001)

Prequestioning is a promising instructional strategy for undergraduate courses

Abstract

Prequestioning is an instructional strategy that involves taking practice tests on to-be-learned information followed by studying the correct answers. Despite promising results in laboratory studies, it has rarely been examined in authentic educational settings. The current study investigated the pedagogical benefits of prequestioning as a learning intervention in an undergraduate environmental chemistry course. In each of 10 lecture sessions, the course lecturer administered four prequestions targeting concepts that were to be taught in the very next lecture session, then presented the correct answers. On assessments occurring during the next lecture session, there was evidence of a prequestioning effect, that is, better performance on questions targeting prequestioned concepts versus non-prequestioned concepts, in most cases. That benefit of prequestioning, which was relatively large (across all lecture sessions, an overall effect size of Cohens d = 2.04, p < .001), highlights the utility of prequestioning as a promising approach for enhancing learning in undergraduate chemistry and similar courses.