All 13 special-issue studies failed to show overall better performance due to disfluency¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · review r2 · q2
Currency · newest study 2016 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? Across the special issue's 13 experiments with more than 1000 participants, disfluent fonts did not produce overall better learning performance. → Tim Kühl & Alexander Eitel 2016

Evidence¶

Tim Kühl & Alexander Eitel 2016¶

Tim Kühl & Alexander Eitel. (2016). Effects of disfluency on cognitive and metacognitive processes and outcomes. Metacognition and Learning, 11, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11409-016-9154-x

q2 · i? · review · r2

Editorial synthesis of the special issue's six manuscripts, 13 experiments with more than 1000 participants, summarized in Table 1. The authors report that "All 13 studies of this special issue failed to show overall better performance due to disfluency".

"All 13 studies of this special issue failed to show overall better performance due to disfluency (see Table 1), suggesting the effect either to be marginal or to be bound to specific conditions."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Disfluency increased study times without improving performance, suggesting time was spent deciphering text rather than processing contents more deeply — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
• Medium moderated disfluency effects on reasoning: disfluent text fostered calibration and performance on screen but not on paper — related
• Working memory capacity moderated disfluency effects in one study but not another — related
• Disfluency affected metacognitive monitoring (JOLs) only under specific conditions: within-subjects manipulation with unrelated word pairs, or on screen rather than paper — related
• Disfluency does not automatically elicit effortful processing; test expectancy improves retention and transfer while disfluency has no effect — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
• The learning benefits of perceptual disfluency reported by Diemand-Yauman et al. (2011) do not replicate in any general way — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
• Medium of presentation interacts with font fluency: disfluent font yields higher success rates on computer but lower on paper — related
• Disfluency is not clearly defined across the literature, hindering replication and precise measurement — related
• In a pre-registered direct replication (N = 96), the disfluency × WMC interaction did not significantly predict retention, failing to replicate Lehmann et al. (2016) — related
• Disfluency benefits retention and comprehension only for learners with high working memory capacity — related
• Low to medium disfluency does not harm learning and sometimes descriptively improves it, though the effect is unstable — reports the opposite