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Effects of disfluency and test expectancy on learning with text

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Abstract

Do students learn better with texts that are (i.e., disfluent)? Previous research yielded discrepant findings concerning this question. To clarify these discrepancies, the present study aimed at identifying a boundary condition that determines when disfluent text is, and is not, beneficial to learning. This boundary condition is knowledge about whether a test will follow (high test expectancy) versus not (low test expectancy). Participants with high test expectancy may already engage in effortful processing, so that making text harder-to-read (disfluent) might not change their processing mode any further. Thus, particularly when no test is expected, disfluency is supposed to exert its beneficial effect. This assumption was tested in a 2 × 2 design (N = 97) with text legibility (fluent vs. disfluent) and test expectancy (low vs. high) as factors, and learning outcomes (retention, transfer) and learning times as main dependent variables. Results revealed that high test expectancy led to better learning outcomes (for retention and transfer), but disfluent text did not. Unlike expected, there was no interaction between the two factors. Moreover, both high test expectancy and disfluency led to longer learning times, resulting in a lower efficiency when learning with disfluent compared to fluent text. Hence, the present results further question the stability and generalizability of a positive disfluency effect on learning, because only high test expectancy – but not disfluency - stimulated better learning through more effortful processing the way it was supposed to.

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Notes

  1. We chose this procedure, because participants in the same group had to work on all the tests simultaneously. Given that learning times were expected to differ rather greatly between the condition with “reading” (low test expectancy) versus “learning” (high test expectancy) instruction, homogeneous groups for this factor were used to rule out the fact that participants with low test expectancy would have had worse learning outcomes, because they finished studying (reading) earlier and therefore had to wait longer for the assessment than participants with high test expectancy. Thus, the potentially confounding factor of a longer delay between studying and testing was diminished by testing groups with low vs. high test expectancy separately. Moreover, to assess its potential impact within the homogeneous groups, the delay between finishing the learning phase and starting with the knowledge test was logged.

  2. To test whether students would quickly adapt to the increased difficulty in reading the disfluent font, we included the position of the page (page 1 vs. page 2 vs. page 3) as within-subjects factor in a 3 × 2 × 2 ANOVA mixed design, with text legibility and test expectancy as between-subjects factors. If students quickly adapted to the font, an interaction between position of the page and text legibility should be found: Learning times should be longer in the disfluent than in the fluent conditions, especially in the beginning of the instruction (on page 1), and this difference should decrease across pages. However, the analysis revealed no interaction between page position and text legibility (F < 1), suggesting that quick adaptation to the disfluent font did not play a major role. The three remaining interactions, including the three-way interaction, were also not significant (all p s  > .15).

  3. The specific predictions made by the moderated disfluency hypothesis could also not be confirmed when testing the hypothesized pattern of results directly, that is, by using orthogonal contrast analysis (cf. Niedenthal et al. 2002).

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Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Thérése-Felicitas Eder for the assistance in conducting the studies.

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  1. Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien, Schleichstrasse 6, 72076, Tübingen, Germany

    Alexander Eitel

  2. Psychology of Education, University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany

    Tim Kühl

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Correspondence to Alexander Eitel.

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Eitel, A., Kühl, T. Effects of disfluency and test expectancy on learning with text. Metacognition Learning 11, 107–121 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11409-015-9145-3

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