People learn better and recall more when they think they will soon need to teach the material to someone else. “When teachers prepare to teach, they tend to seek out key points and organize information into a coherent structure,” Nestojko says. “What I find most intriguing about this research is that learning was significantly impacted even though we did nothing more than alter participants’ expectations prior to learning,” Nestojko says. Test prep vs teaching prepAn important takeaway for teachers is that it appears students often need to be guided in how to discover strategies that are optimal for learning. “Worse yet, telling students to prepare for a test does not lead them to select from this toolbox those strategies that would lead to their best performance,” she says.