The testing effect (also known as retrieval practice, active recall, practice testing, or test-enhanced learning) suggests long-term memory is increased when some of the learning period is devoted to retrieving information from memory. It is different from more general practice effect, defined in the APA Dictionary of Psychology as "any change or improvement that results from practice or repetition of task items or activities." Cognitive psychologists are working with educators to look at how to take advantage of tests—not as an assessment tool, but as a teaching tools as testing prior knowledge is more beneficial for learning when compared to reading or passively studying material, even more so when the test is more challenging for memory. History Before much experimental evidence had been collected, the utility of testing was already evident to some perceptive observers including Francis Bacon who discussed it as a learning strategy as early as 1620. "Hence if you read a piece of text through twenty times, you will not learn it by heart so easily as if you read it ten times while attempting to recite it from time to time and consulting the text when your memory fails." Towards the end of the 19th century, Harvard psychologist William James described the testing effect in the following section of his 1890 book "The Principles of Psychology" "A curious peculiarity of our memory is that things are impressed better by active than by passive repetition. I mean that in learning (by heart, for example), when we almost know the piece, it pays better to wait and recollect by an effort from within, than to look at the book again. If we recover the words in the former way, we shall probably know them the next time; if in the latter way, we shall very likely need the book once more." The first documented empirical studies on the testing effect were published in 1909 by Edwina E. Abbott which was followed up by research into the transfer and retrieval of prior learning. In his 1932 book Psychology of Study, C. A. Mace said: "On the matter of sheer repetitive drill there is another principle of the highest importance: Active repetition is very much more effective than passive repetition. ... there are two ways of introducing further repetitions. We may re-read this list: this is passive repetition. We may recall it to mind without reference to the text before