I tested a student named Olympia by asking her to spell vocabulary words that were on her spelling quiz. The reason I did this was that she was not working on a homework assignment, so I thought I could ask her some spelling words to see if she knew the words or not. This method is called active recall because students are being tested or testing themselves on what they know and don’t know. As I scanned the word list, I randomly chose the words to be spelled and told Olympia to spell them. Olympia spelled almost all the words correctly with one or two mistakes, and she displayed contentment on her face when I complimented her for every word spelled correctly. Additionally, I tested a student named Georgia with her multiplication because she was writing out all the multiplication tables from one to nine on the back of her multiplication table cheat sheet. I was unsure if she knew all her multiplication tables, and I figured the only way to find out was to test her. I asked her to tell me the answers to some of the multiplication problems, and she answered them correctly with certain problems requiring more time than the other problems. Georgia’s hands were on her lap, and I noticed that she found the answers to the hard multiplication problems by counting the numbers with her fingers. That image of her counting touched my heart because I remembered counting with my fingers from elementary school to middle school when we were not allowed to use calculators on math exams. I told Georgia that counting with her fingers may take more time, but she should not be embarrassed because she should stick to a method that will get her the answer. By testing the students on what they learned, I understood the importance of active recall as the keys to exam success and memory consolidation because the brain is actively engaged to recall the information learned or studied.