Fortune favors the ( ): Effects of disfluency on educational outcomes

Previous research has shown that disfluency--the subjective experience of difficulty associated with cognitive operations - leads to deeper processing. Two studies explore the extent to which this deeper processing engendered by disfluency interventions can lead to improved memory performance. Study 1 found that information in hard-to-read fonts was better remembered than easier to read information in a controlled laboratory setting. Study 2 extended this finding to high school classrooms. The results suggest that superficial changes to learning materials could yield significant improvements in educational outcomes.

[1]  Ayanna K. Thomas,et al.  Metacomprehension for educationally relevant materials: Dramatic effects of encoding-retrieval interactions , 2007, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[2]  Robert A. Bjork,et al.  The Generation Effect: Support for a Two-Factor Theory , 1988 .

[3]  Daniel M. Oppenheimer.  The secret life of fluency , 2008, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[4]  Marcia C. Linn,et al.  Linking Cognitive Science to Education: Generation and Interleaving Effects , 2005 .

[5]  Mark A. McDaniel,et al.  When text difficulty benefits less-skilled readers , 2002 .

[6]  F. Craik,et al.  Levels of Pro-cessing: A Framework for Memory Research , 1975 .

[7]  N. J. Slamecka,et al.  The Generation Effect: Delineation of a Phenomenon , 1978 .

[8]  R. Bjork.  Memory and metamemory considerations in the training of human beings. , 1994 .

[9]  Daniel M. Oppenheimer,et al.  Uniting the Tribes of Fluency to Form a Metacognitive Nation , 2009, Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

[10]  Jere Brophy,et al.  Research on the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy and Teacher Expectations. , 1983 .

[11]  F. Craik,et al.  Depth of processing and the retention of words , 1975 .

[12]  A. Castel,et al.  Illusions of competence and overestimation of associative memory for identical items: Evidence from judgments of learning , 2007, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[13]  J. Byers,et al.  Student Expectations and Teacher Education Traditions with Which We Can and Cannot Live , 1983 .

[14]  Daniel M. Oppenheimer,et al.  Effects of Fluency on Psychological Distance and Mental Construal (or Why New York Is a Large City, but New York Is a Civilized Jungle) , 2008, Psychological science.

[15]  J. Metcalfe,et al.  Metacognition : knowing about knowing , 1994 .

[16]  Daniel M. Oppenheimer,et al.  Overcoming intuition: metacognitive difficulty activates analytic reasoning. , 2007, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[17]  W. Kintsch,et al.  Are Good Texts Always Better? Interactions of Text Coherence, Background Knowledge, and Levels of Understanding in Learning From Text , 1996 .

[18]  M. McDaniel,et al.  Order information and retrieval distinctiveness: recall of common versus bizarre material. , 2000, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[19]  Matthew G. Rhodes,et al.  Memory predictions are influenced by perceptual information: evidence for metacognitive illusions. , 2008, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[20]  Bucciarelli,et al.  Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society , 2005 .

[21]  N. Schwarz,et al.  Effects of Perceptual Fluency on Affective Judgments , 1998 .

[22]  P. Chandler,et al.  Why Some Material Is Difficult to Learn , 1994 .

[23]  S. T. Johnson,et al.  Self- and Teacher Expectancy Effects on Academic Performance of College Students Enrolled in an Academic Reinforcement Program , 1983 .

[24]  Norbert Schwarz,et al.  FLUENCY AND THE DETECTION OF MISLEADING QUESTIONS : LOW PROCESSING FLUENCY ATTENUATES THE MOSES ILLUSION , 2008 .

[25]  D. Donaldson,et al.  It’s the way that you, er, say it: Hesitations in speech affect language comprehension , 2007, Cognition.