For those who complain about too much testing testing testing (FCAT and otherwise), here's an interesting counterpoint from yesterday's New York Times:

In one of his own experiments, Dr. Roediger (Henry L. Roediger III, a psychologist at Washington University in St. Louis) and Jeffrey Karpicke, also of Washington University, had college students study science passages from a reading comprehension test, in short study periods. When students studied the same material twice, in back-to-back sessions, they did very well on a test given immediately afterward, then began to forget the material. But if they studied the passage just once and did a practice test in the second session, they did very well on one test two days later, and another given a week later.

“Testing has such bad connotation; people think of standardized testing or teaching to the test,” Dr. Roediger said. “Maybe we need to call it something else, but this is one of the most powerful learning tools we have.”