For all of you test faithful, so long cowering in the shadows of “critical thinking skills” and free range blah-blah,  you can come out now.

In a big boost for common sense – ie. tests are a good way to encourage learning and to test its staying power – the NY Times is reporting on a new study that finds that “taking a test is not just a passive mechanism for assessing how much people know,”  but “actually helps people learn, and it works better than a number of other studying techniques.”

Thank God, the pendulum still swings.

–Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow