AUTHOR=Pieger Elisabeth , Mengelkamp Christoph , Bannert Maria TITLE=Disfluency as a Desirable Difficulty—The Effects of Letter Deletion on Monitoring and Performance JOURNAL=Frontiers in Education VOLUME=3 YEAR=2018 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/education/articles/10.3389/feduc.2018.00101 DOI=10.3389/feduc.2018.00101 ISSN=2504-284X ABSTRACT=
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 (