Effects Of Perceptual Disfluency On Pupils' Retention And Comprehension

The research on perceptual disfluency in educational psychology found that increasing the difficulty of subjective perception of learning materials was beneficial to learning.This phenomenon,which reduces the perceived fluency of learning materials and increases the subjective difficulty perceived by learners,stimulates the analytical thinking of learners and ultimately improves their academic performance,is called "disfluency effect".However,the previous studies on the effect of fluency are not consistent.Some studies support the effect of disfluency,while others do not.Theories that support the disfluency effect include the disfluency theory.The disfluency theory holds that the increase in task difficulty,rather than the increase in objective difficulty,leads to more mental efforts and deeper processing and thus promotes learning.Among the theories that do not support the disfluency effect is cognitive load theory,which predicts that additional cognitive load(extraneous cognitive load)induced by perceptual disfluency hinders learning.Does the extra cognitive load caused by perceptual fluency promote learning or hinder learning?Does the fluency effect exist in the learning of primary school students?This is what needs to be discussed in this study 1.The manipulation of perceptual fluency itself also needs to be discussed in order to find out whether there is a controversy about the disfluency effect.Searching for and capturing important parts of the text(e.g.,key words throughout the learning text)may be the key to effective learning.Important parts,as a very important means of external manipulation of text,have never appeared in text fluency manipulation.It is necessary to explore the influence of important part manipulation on the disfluency effect in this study 2.In order to explore these questions,this study manipulates perceptual fluency by examining the disfluency effect on learning outcomes(knowledge retention and reading comprehension),cognitive load(extraneous cognitive load),and mental effort.The results of study 1 are divided into two parts: first,in terms of reading comprehension,no disfluency effect was observed in grades 2 to 6;Second,in terms of knowledge retention,the disfluency operation of traditional perception did not lead to the difference in knowledge retention scores between the fluency group and the disfluency group from grade 2 to grade 5.However,the disfluency operation of traditional perception hindered the knowledge retention learning of grade 6,opposingthe disfluency effect.The results of study 2 showed that the The significant part of text perception was disfluency group the had lower cognitive load and better knowledge retention and reading comprehension than the whole text perception fluency group.Cognitive load theory holds that the increase of extraneous cognitive load hinders the learning of texts,while the perceptual disfluency of important parts of texts can reduce extraneousl cognitive load and promote learning.The experimental results support the cognitive load theory's explanation of the unsupported disfluency effect.The results of study 1 show that in terms of knowledge retention,for students from grade 2 to grade 5,the traditional perceptual disfluency operation has neither support nor objection to the disfluency effect.For students from grade 6,the traditional perceptual disfluency operation hinders the learning effect and opposes the existence of the disfluency effect.The results of study 2 show that the perceptual disfluency operation of important text parts can improve the learning effect of knowledge retention and reading comprehension of 6 grade students.To sum up,the conclusion of this study is that the perception of important parts of the text is disfluency operation produce disfluency effect.