Abstract:
The presence of the testing effect in a retention interval of 8 hours is investigated in this
study. Undergraduate students were told to remember a word list and were either given a test to
study or re-read the word list before taking a recall test for these words 8 hours later. There was
no difference in word recall accuracy for those who were given a test to study and who re-read
the word list to study. The results showed that the testing effect was not present for a retention
interval of 8 hours. This null effect is atypical to the robustness of the testing effect found in
other studies that have a retention interval of at least 1 day.