Challenging the notion of a general disfluency effect: the moderating effect of element-interactivity on perceptual disfluency
Maik Beege; Maik Beege; Christoph Mengelkamp; Steve Nebel · 2026 · Frontiers in Education
WASTE classifies this as Negative / Null Result Report · AI classification, approximate
The study found no significant effect — useful as a negative control or null benchmark for your own design.
The finding, in one line
“However, an ongoing debate persists regardxing the robustness of this effect, as some studies have failed to replicate it or have uncovered opposing outcomes.”
Abstract
IntroductionThe disfluency effect proposes that deliberately introducing challenges or difficulties into the learning process can be advantageous. Particularly, perceptual disfluency (e.g., harder to read fonts) might affect learning positively. However, an ongoing debate persists regardxing the robustness of this effect, as some studies have failed to replicate it or have uncovered opposing outcomes.MethodsTo investigate potential moderators of the disfluency effect, two experiments were conducted using different types of instructional materials (instructional texts: N1 = 76; concept maps: N2
Abstract by Maik Beege; Maik Beege; Christoph Mengelkamp; Steve Nebel, Frontiers in Education (2026) — licensed CC BY 4.0.
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Metadata source: DOAJ · DOI 10.3389/feduc.2025.1731080