\nResearchers found that, on average, those given the harder-to-read fonts actually recalled 14% more. <\/p>\n
They believe that presenting information in a way that is hard to digest means a person has to concentrate more, and this leads to “deeper processing” and then “better retrieval” afterwards.<\/p>\n
It is an example of the positive effects of what scientists call “disfluency”. <\/p>\n
“Disfluency is just a subjective feeling of difficulty associated with any mental task,” explained psychology Prof Daniel Oppenheimer, one of the co-authors of the study. <\/p>\n
“So if something is hard to see or hear, it feels disfluent… We’d found that disfluency led people to think harder about things.<\/p>\n
“When we found that in the lab, we were very excited, because it has obvious implications for the classroom.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The study was repeated on high school students, and the results showed they scored higher in classroom assessments when given learning materials in harder-to-read fonts. <\/p>\n
If you find it difficult to concentrate on written language learning materials, perhaps changing the font could help. Has anyone tried this? It sounds quite distracting to me. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
New research appears to show that difficult-to-read fonts make for better learning. The study at Princeton University employed volunteers to learn made-up information and then try to recall it. The results showed that the volunteers whose information was in harder-to-read fonts were more likely to recall the information when tested 15 minutes later. From BBC […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,27,154],"tags":[883,885,884,709],"class_list":["post-912","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-hints-and-tips","category-research","tag-fonts-learning","tag-language-learning-materials","tag-language-learning-methods","tag-written-language"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=912"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/912\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":914,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/912\/revisions\/914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}