Fortune favors the bold (and the italicized): Effects of disfluency on

educational outcomes

Diemand-Yauman, Oppenheimer & Vaughan

Optimizing learning

• Many believe that the key to teach and learn effectively relies on instincts and experience oStudents often gauge the success of

their learning based on the ease of encoding information

o "If it feels easy, it’s because I have learned it well"

Desirable difficulties

• However, ease of encoding is not always a good indicator of subsequent performance or long-term learning

• Conditions that make the acquisition of information more difficult can lead to better long-term retention, to the extent that the difficulty engages elaborative processing.

Desirable difficulties

• Some well-known difficulties:o The spacing effect

Increasing the time between encoding events leads to better memory

Allows for more forgetting, making subsequent encoding(s) more difficult

o The generation effect Omitting some information during encoding (such as letters

in a word) leads to better memory Initial encoding requires more extensive processing

o Benefits only seen if encoding is successful

Ease of processing

• Spacing and generation are methods that simultaneously manipulate subjective difficulty and objective difficulty of encoding of material oThey both feel harder, and actually are

more difficult

Fluency and disfluency

• The subjective ease of processing of information = fluency

• We use fluency (and disfluency) as a heuristic to gauge difficulty level o Sense of ease can come from objective difficulty/

ease of material o When learning feels easy (i.e., is fluent), often it’s

because it really is easy

Invalid cues to fluency

• However, sense of ease can arise from invalid sources, such as perceptual disfluencyo Ex. Different font size, different typeface o These manipulations do not change the objective

difficulty of encodingo Can affect subjective feeling of difficulty, altering

judgements of difficulty

Fluency and creating desirable difficulties

• Fluency is highly related to people’s confidence in their ability to later remember new information

• More confident = less likely to encode in more effortful and elaborative processing styles

Hypothesis:• Changing the subjective, but not objective,

difficulty of encoding can elicit more effective processing strategies

• Making educational materials more perceptually disfluent may indirectly improve retention of the material by decreasing confidence in how well the material has been learned

Experiment Methods: Participants

• 222 high school students from a public school in Ohio participated

• For a class to be chosen, the same teacher must have been teaching at least two classes of the same subject and difficulty with the same supplementary learning material. o AP English, Honors English, Honors Physics, Regular

Physics, Honors History and Honors Chemistry

Methods: Materials

• Teachers sent all supplementary materials to the experimenters in advance

• Experimenters manipulated two types of learning materials: worksheets and powerpoint slides

• Actual content was not altered • Experimenters never had face-to-face

contact with the students

Methods: Procedure and Design

• Different sections of each class randomly assigned to a disfluent or control condition

• Disfluent fonts: o Haettenschweiler, Monotype Corsiva, Comic Sans Italicizedo Or, were photocopied disfluently (move paper up and down) if

not electronic

• Font sizes not changed unless font made it illegible

Methods: Procedure and Design

• To prevent self-fulfilling prophecies, teachers were blind to the hypothesiso One teacher refused to use Haettenschweiler and was

switched to Comic Sans

• No other changes made to the learning environment

Methods: Procedure and Design

• Results of normal assessment tests for classes were collected and analyzed

• 4 question survey administered afterwards:o How difficult do you find the material in this class?o How do you feel about the material covered in class?o How frequently do you feel confused or lost during class?o How likely are you to take classes on this material in college?

The Corona

The Corona is the Sun’s outer atmosphere and can be clearly seen during an eclipse. It consists of ionized gases with a temperature varying from 1 to 5 million degrees Celsius. The Corona’s high temperature is puzzling because it cannot gain heat from the photosphere, which only has a temperature of 6000 degrees Celsius. It is thought that its energy comes from the magnetic fields in the active regions of the Sun.

Globular Clusters Globular clusters are spherical clusters of stars bound together by gravity. More than a hundred are known in the Milky Way where they pursue eccentric inclined orbits in the galactic halo. They typically measure about 150 light years across and contain about 100,000 stars, although larger clusters may contain up to a million. In the center of a cluster, the stars are dense and only light days apart, instead of light years.

Please read the following passages:

Corona and Globular Clusters

• Which do you think was the easier topic? • If you were later given an essay test, from

which topic would you remember more information?

• If 100 people read and were tested on the previous passages, how many would do better on the Corona passage than the Globular Cluster passage?

Corona and Globular Clusters

• Were the judgments you just made affected by how the passages were presented? If so, how?

Results: Test Performance

• Scores converted to Z-scores to provide a common metric

• Students in the disfluent condition scored higher on classroom assessments (M = .164) than those in the control (M = -.295), p < .001.

• No reliable differences between the three types of disfluent fonts.

Results: Affective Responses

• No significant difference between the disfluent and fluent samples on any of the questions asked, p > .1.

• No liking or motivational differences based on fluencyo Not because the questions were not sensitive enough--able to

detect differences in liking and confusion between subject classes (e.g. between chemistry and history)

Discussion

• Student retention of material across a wide range of subjects and difficulty levels can be significantly improved by simply presenting material in disfluent formats.

• This "desirable difficulty" effect - whilst engaging deeper processing strategies - is driven by surface features that have nothing to do with semantic processing.

Discussion

• Alternative explanation: hard-to-read fonts were more distinctive...but o At least Comic Sans and Monotype Corsiva

are not so "extreme" o No "wearing off" of novelty through the course

of the semester

Discussion

• Implications for educational practice!• Caveats:

o When does material stop being disfluent and start being illegible or too difficult?

o Fluency can come many forms, not all lead to improved retentionRhodes and Castel (2008): Font size

o Other factors: type of material, how the materials are tested

Discussion

• But still, fluency interventions are very cost-effective and easily integrated

• Do not require curriculum reform, and does not interfere with teaching styles

• Demonstrates that small interventions can potentially lead to big performance improvements

End of slide show. Please proceed to the test.