That is: when students <span style="color: #000000;"><b>didn’t&nbsp;</b></span>review a particular set of facts, they could still reason with them — as long as they <strong>had practiced</strong> doing that kind of reasoning.

Although fact quizzes were beneficial for fact learning, they did not facilitate higher order learning, contrary to popular intuition based on Bloom’s taxonomy.

Contrary to popular intuition, building a foundation of factual knowledge via retrieval practice did not enhance students’ higher order learning. Instead, students’ final fact test and higher order test performance was greatest following retrieval practice that matched in cognitive complexity based on Bloom’s taxonomy: fact quizzes enhanced final fact test performance and higher order quizzes enhanced final higher order test performance. Retrieval practice increased learning by 20–30% under laboratory conditions with college students and also in an authentic K-12 classroom.

Why didn’t fact quizzes improve higher order learning in the present study, as many cognitive scientists and educators contend? First, students may have been unaware that information on fact quizzes was related to final higher order tests, thus they did not transfer their knowledge without explicit instructions to do so.

Mixed quizzes, comprising both fact and higher order questions, increased higher order test performance more than fact quizzes (in Experiment 2) and slightly more than higher order quizzes (in Experiment

If we want to reach the top of Bloom’s taxonomy, building a foundation of knowledge via fact-based retrieval practice may be less potent than engaging in higher order retrieval practice at the outset, a key finding for future research and classroom application.