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

Main points:

• Disfluency increases retention. This increase is observed over an array of subjects and difficulty levels.
  
  

Still unclear: 

I haven't had much experience with Z-scores and am unsure how they are calculated. The authors state their rational for this conversion, to provide a common metric for comparison across different courses, but its still unclear why that was necessary. Perhaps the courses at this high school used different scales to assign letter grades but why wouldn't the percent correct on the exams still correlate?

I also wonder what types of questions the exams were comprised of. The authors seem to think they only measured memorized concepts. I imagine this is an accurate reflection of the assessments but I was surprised to see there was no further discussion of exams used, especially since it was surveying a number of different courses and subjects.


Further questions:

• So disfluency increases retention of memorized concepts... but how does it affect deep, meaningful learning?  
• How much disfluency is too much? The protocol here was 60% of the presented text. What would the affects be if 75% of the text was disfluent? How about 40%?
  

Teaching implications:

As much as I wish it wasn't so, I really feel that some concepts in human anatomy and physiology, or any course for that matter, can be sufficiently mastered by memorization. For instance, when my students are learning about the ankle and wrist, I'm completely fine with them memorizing the names of the articulating carpals and tarsals prior to a discussion of joint physiology. Often times we make lists of the names/terms we want our students to memorize and provide them as a study tool. I could envision that this article could change how I create those lists.