Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Do students learn better with material that is perceptually harder-to-process? Previous research has been equivocal concerning thisquestion. To clarify these discrepancies, the present studyexamined two potential boundary conditions to determine whendisfluent text is, and is not, beneficial to learning. The twoboundary conditions examined were: type of judgement oflearning (JOLs) and testing expectancy. Boundary conditionswere examined in separate Group (incidental aggregate JOLs vs.intentional aggregate JOLs vs. item-by-item JOLs) by Disfluency(Masked vs. Nonmasked) mixed ANOVAs. Results revealed thattype of JOL did not moderate the disfluency effect, but testingexpectancy did. These results bring forth questions pertaining tothe utility of disfluency on learning.