Commentary: Is disfluency desirable?

For good reasons, the results reported by Diemand-Yauman et al. (2011), accompanied by the clever title, BFortune favors the bold (and the italicized): effects of disfluency on educational outcomes,^ have had a big impact, not only among researchers, but also in the public media. First, from a common-sense standpoint, why should making to-be-learned materials harder to read by virtue of a more-difficult-to-read typeface have any benefits? Second, from a research standpoint, what kind of productive processing might be triggered by disfluency? And third, could introducing disfluency be an important, if surprising, way to increase comprehension? That is, if such a manipulation were able to improve metacognitive accuracy and/or benefit learning, then it would be a valuable—not to mention a fairly simple— intervention. As the editors of this special issue point out, in the years since the appearance of DiemandYauman et al.’s intriguing findings there have been many follow-up studies using a variety of methods and materials, a number of which have failed to replicate Diemand-Yauman et al.’s dramatic findings. In that context, a more thorough investigation of the potential benefits of perceptual disfluency and its possible boundary conditions is clearly desirable, and this special issue constitutes just such an investigation. The six impressive studies in this special issue test a variety of boundary conditions for the effect of disfluency on metacognitive judgments, reading time, recall, and comprehension. They examine, collectively, various factors that may moderate or mediate the effect of disfluency. They employ a variety of materials, including word lists, passages, and problem-solving tasks; they examine a range of degrees of disfluency; and they include a broad spectrum of other potentially moderating or mediating variables—even different media of presentation, such as paper versus a computer screen. We first provide brief summaries of the papers in this issue and then conclude with some broader comments on disfluency and when difficulties are and are not desirable. Metacognition Learning (2016) 11:133–137 DOI 10.1007/s11409-016-9156-8