Short answer: yes, and it's one of the best-supported findings in learning research. The longer answer has some catches worth knowing.
This whole project started with Spanish flash cards. My son is 7 and learning Spanish, and I wanted practice he'd actually look forward to. Before I built a game around quizzing, I wanted to know whether quizzing was even the right idea, or just the thing that's easiest to turn into a game. So I went and read the studies. Here's what I found.
The short version
The idea is called retrieval practice, or the testing effect. When you try to remember something, that effort makes it stick better than looking at it again.
The study most people point to had college students read short passages. Some reread them and some took a recall test instead. A few days later, the test group remembered more. The rereaders did better only on a test given right away, which is probably why rereading feels like it works (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006).
College students aren't my kids, so I looked for younger ones. The closest match I found was three experiments with 88 children who averaged about 10 years old. Practicing recall beat restudying, and it helped kids regardless of how strong their reading was (Karpicke, Blunt & Smith, 2016). It was a small study using word lists, not schoolwork. But it pointed the same way.
The bigger picture is more convincing than any single study. A 2021 review of 50 experiments in real classrooms found that most of the effects were medium or large, across grade levels and subjects (Agarwal, Nunes & Blunt, 2021). An earlier review of ten common study techniques gave only two its top rating: practice testing and spreading practice out over time. Highlighting and rereading rated low (Dunlosky et al., 2013).
One honest note from that same review: the evidence for young children was thinner than for older students. Most of this research is on teenagers and adults. I'm extrapolating down to my kindergartner, and you would be too.
The second idea is the spacing effect. The same amount of practice works better broken into sessions over days than crammed into one. This one has studies with younger kids:
Both studies were small, 39 and 36 children. But they line up with a large body of adult research (Cepeda et al., 2006). For me, the takeaway was ten minutes a few times a week rather than one long session on Sunday.
Multiple choice is the weaker kind. A large review found that recall, producing the answer yourself, helps more than recognition, picking it from a list (Rowland, 2014). That's an awkward finding for me, because our game uses multiple choice. Young kids can't type answers quickly, and a 5 year old who's still learning to read needs choices to tap. So I made that tradeoff knowingly. When we play together, asking "what do you think it is?" before looking at the choices turns it back into recall.
Feedback matters. Getting an answer wrong and never learning the right one doesn't help much. The research consistently pairs quizzing with showing the correct answer afterward.
Low stakes, or it backfires. I don't want quizzing to feel like a test my kids can fail. In one survey of middle and high school students whose classes used frequent, low-stakes quizzes, 72% said they felt less nervous about tests (Agarwal et al., 2014). That's older kids reporting their own feelings, with no comparison group, so it isn't proof. But it matches my gut: the quiz should be a game, not a grade.
Fun isn't the same as learning. A review of learning games found they did help kids learn, modestly, but they weren't significantly more motivating than regular teaching (Wouters et al., 2013). I found that humbling. The game part is what gets my kids to sit down and practice. The practice is what does the work.
That's also how I tried to build Super Trivia Kids: short levels, the right answer shown every time, and a boss at the end of each level that asks about what you just practiced. Nobody has tested whether the game itself improves learning, and I won't claim that. What I can say is that it's built on the techniques above.
They can be, if your child tries to answer before flipping the card. Trying to recall an answer, called retrieval practice, helps memory more than rereading. That has been shown in kids around 10 years old as well as adults. Flipping straight to the answer loses most of the benefit.
Short and spread out beats long and crammed. In one classroom study, fifth graders who learned vocabulary in two sessions a week apart remembered more five weeks later than kids taught it all at once. There's no proven ideal schedule for young kids, but a few short sessions a week fits the research.
No. Research reviews find that producing an answer helps memory more than picking it from a list. Multiple choice still helps, especially for kids who can't type or read well yet. Asking "what do you think it is?" before showing the choices turns it back into recall.
It depends on the stakes. In a survey of middle and high school students whose classes used frequent low-stakes quizzes, 72% said they felt less nervous about tests. That was self-reported by older students, so it isn't proof for young kids. Keeping quizzes playful and ungraded is the safer bet.
About this article. I'm a parent and a software engineer, not a researcher, teacher or doctor. I wrote this from the published studies listed below, each linked to the original paper so you can check my reading of it. Where a study was small, or done with a different age group, I've said so.
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