The Style of Font and Learning.

  I'd like to start today's entry with a huge thank you to Adam Liss for the idea.  He shared a link on the style of font and learning which was quite interesting and something I'd not heard about before.

After reading up on the topic, my first response was wow followed by "That makes sense."  So here is information on the topic.

Most people think that if you change the size of the font, italicize it, Make it Bold, or other adjustment, it is going to help people retain the knowledge better.  Research indicates this is not correct. 

What they are finding is that it is better to use a font that is more difficult to read if you want people to remember the information. If you want to learn the information, we learn better if we have to struggle a bit so by using an unfamiliar difficult to read font, we are adding that bit of struggle.

If the fonts are familiar, we become over confident in thinking that we have retained the information when in reality we've only skimmed it for the essence of the material and really do not spend time learning it.  When we have to slow down our reading speed, we are more likely to spend time really reading the piece while processing and learning the information.  

According to a summary published by the University of Washington,  researchers at Princeton  conducted one experiment to see if the type  of  font would improve memory.  Volunteers were given material printed in different fonts for 90 seconds.  15 minutes later, they were tested and the researchers discovered that 72.8% remembered the material printed with easy to read font while 86.5% remembered material printed with harder to read fonts such as Comic Sans.

A second experiment took place in several high school classes with the same level of abilities.  The researchers changed the fonts on worksheets and power points.  The results showed higher scores for all students who used the worksheets and power points written in a harder to read fonts.  The thing about this experiment is that it was conducted at a school with teachers teaching at least two sections of each class.  One class got materials using the normal fonts while the other class had the unfamiliar fonts. 

The researchers concluded that this one simple change could improve learning. Their explanation for these results is that people must employ deeper processing strategies when using the harder to read fonts.  So they have to think more about the material they are reading when its an unfamiliar font. This disfluency causes people to process information more deeply, abstractly, carefully, and better.  

Just to let you know magazines and newspapers from the New York Times, to Wired, to the Harvard Business Review felt this information is significant enough to publish something on it. This study made an impact in the education field. They conclude that this is one easy thing to do to help students learn more.

I plan to use this with my students beginning in January.  Let me know what you think.  Thank you Adam for this.  Have a good holiday.