TY  - JOUR
A1  - Pieger, Elisabeth
A1  - Mengelkamp, Christoph
A1  - Bannert, Maria
T1  - Disfluency as a Desirable Difficulty — The Effects of Letter Deletion on Monitoring and Performance
JF  - Frontiers in Education
N2  - Desirable difficulties initiate learning processes that foster performance. Such a desirable difficulty is generation, e.g., filling in deleted letters in a deleted letter text. Likewise, letter deletion is a manipulation of processing fluency: A deleted letter text is more difficult to process than an intact text. Disfluency theory also supposes that disfluency initiates analytic processes and thus, improves performance. However, performance is often not affected but, rather, monitoring is affected. The aim of this study is to propose a specification of the effects of disfluency as a desirable difficulty: We suppose that mentally filling in deleted letters activates analytic monitoring but not necessarily analytic cognitive processing and improved performance. Moreover, once activated, analytic monitoring should remain for succeeding fluent text. To test our assumptions, half of the students (n = 32) first learned with a disfluent (deleted letter) text and then with a fluent (intact) text. Results show no differences in monitoring between the disfluent and the fluent text. This supports our assumption that disfluency activates analytic monitoring that remains for succeeding fluent text. When the other half of the students (n = 33) first learned with a fluent and then with a disfluent text, differences in monitoring between the disfluent and the fluent text were found. Performance was significantly affected by fluency but in favor of the fluent texts, and hence, disfluency did not activate analytic cognitive processing. Thus, difficulties can foster analytic monitoring that remains for succeeding fluent text, but they do not necessarily improve performance. Further research is required to investigate how analytic monitoring can lead to improved cognitive processing and performance.
KW  - metacomprehension
KW  - disfluency
KW  - metacognitive monitoring
KW  - metacognitive control
KW  - metacognitive judgments
KW  - desirable difficulties
Y1  - 2018
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-197179
SN  - 2504-284X
VL  - 3
IS  - 101
ER  -