A recent article in The Economist entitled Learning difficulties describes a paradox of educational research which is that when you present information in a way that looks easy to learn it often has the opposite effect. According to the article: "Numerous studies have demonstrated that when people are forced to think hard about what they are shown they remember it better." The article describes new research at Princeton University which showed that students scored better on memory tests about biology when presented with information in harder to read fonts. Apparently, "When the researchers asked teachers to use the technique in high-school lessons on chemistry, physics, English and history, they got similar results."
Now after years of helping designers to choose fonts which make reading easier this sort of research is a little demoralising. It's also hard to explain. Presumably the effort of having to concentrate hard to read the material benefits the student in terms of their ability to memorise. How much further should we go - have the student read the text upside down and at a great distance in a mirror? I think not.
While not disregarding the results of this research, it seems to me to have only limited relevance to workplace learning, where the memorisation of factual information is of limited applicability. Secondly, success in this research depended on the subjects being motivated enough to battle on in adverse circumstances. Many learners would just disregard learning material that was not presented in a user-friendly fashion. And it's not as if those reading the more friendly material did badly - they still got 72.8% of the answers right, compared to 86.5% for those battling against illegibility.
This post makes me chuckle. I know the numbers don't lie (although we don't have the study in front of us to review directly), but as with the commenters to that Economist article, my experience simply does not play out that way.
ReplyDeleteComic Sans is that difficult to read? On a personal level I don't think it's hard to read at all, only that it's the most annoying font in human history because everyone thinks it's fun and jovial to use in their emails. I worked in an environment recently where very serious communications were done on a regular basis, and Comic Sans was the font of choice. If it were a good font for helping people recall information more easily, it sure wasn't obvious.
I think the difficulty of the content is enough to enforce people reading it thoroughly. If I encounter something I do not know or am not sure of in something like a book or article, I go look it up before moving on. This helps me reinforce the topic while being able to speak more intelligently about it.
Again, research is research and the numbers are there. But I can't help thinking something else is at play here. Perhaps the researchers should have tried having the group read through material that was much more dry and technical while employing the font changes, rather than giving lists of different aliens. Seems to me that would be a more real-world test.
Great find! It's an interesting article that brings up some good questions. However, I personally think that the key phrase in the article is "when people are forced to think hard about what they are shown they remember it better." By presenting information in a more visually challenging manner with harder-to-skim fonts, it's forcing a learner to engage with it more slowly and thoughtfully. Force techniques, or content "push", works within very specific, constrained learning environments. I'm cringing a bit when I think of certain stakeholders, the one's that exist in every organization, extrapolating the Economist's results to education. Can you imagine an SME seizing on font type as a new magic bullet to replace the need for engaging content and "pull" techniques?
ReplyDeleteI think the key word here is 'forced'
ReplyDeleteResearch subjects and students are not the same thing. Try paying students to read their material in a harder font in the name of science and you might achieve similar results, otherwise obscuring it will only degrade retention of information.
A better alternative would be to find a different way of slowing down the student without making their experience difficult eg - present the information in a way that's easy to digest, but also encourage repetition and revision, which is presumably how obscuring the material creates better retention in the first place.
This post made me shiver - almost every day I teache-course developers and teachers to select best fonts, best layouts and use space wisely to ensure learning and attention to what's on sreen...
ReplyDeleteBut maybe the research is not that horrifing. Students are motivated to learn and to pass the course. And the more effort is needed to read the text for the exam the more concentration is used the more the can remember on tests.
But can they still use it? Can they apply knowledge recieved while reading something that is difficult to see, read and comprehence?
In corporate setting noone will pay that much attention and noone will concentrate that hard to learning something from the bad texts with bad fonts.
I think the results are interesting but a very long way from the policy implications that the article implies.
ReplyDeleteThe subjects spent 90 seconds, not just reading, but trying to memorize entirely foreign material. How often does that happen in real life?
The article mentions that the effect can be applied in broader situations but doesn't give us any details.
I'll wait for extensive confirmation of this unusual result before I make any changes in how I present information.
Clive, sure, there's the U-shaped curve of performance, where under a little stress, people perform better. However, the curve shifts for individuals to the point where it's only useful if you know a person's stress level. Which is why I advocate lowering anxiety, increasing motivation, and then providing the challenge *in* the task (intrinsic motivation). As others have pointed out, research studies on rote knowledge doesn't necessarily transfer well to learning meaningful skills.
ReplyDeleteThis post also made me chuckle. If only one could ensure good test results by choosing the right font. Never mind motivation, study habits, critical thinking skills or anything that might affect one being a more or less successful learner. It all comes down to the choice between Times New Roman and Arial. Hooray!
ReplyDeleteNicky
Hi Clive. It's not an entirely surprising finding: people are 'cognitive misers' and - understandably - will not invest any more time digesting stuff than is entirely necessary. Back in the 70s the 'Levels of Processing' approach theorised that memory is a function of deeper processing (whatever deeper meant) based on research suggesting that thinking hard about the meaning of words aided recall. It may just be that spending more time makes all the difference. Whatever the case, it makes perfect sense that the easier it is for us to process information, the less we get out of it and it is for this reason that happy sheets are a bad thing: not only do they not measure anything relevant, they actively encourage us to create experiences from which we learn very little. As always, it's a bit like food - the better it tastes, the worse it is for you ;o)
ReplyDeleteThis was interesting to read, but the results seem random...there is research to point at the fact that students tend to ignore everything on the right side of the page (advertisements usually show up on the right side on websites), but to make a font more difficult to read is slightly absurd. Maybe we should just up the ante of the content of the reading material, and leave everything in Times New Roman=)
ReplyDeleteAn enjoyable read, Clive--thanks.
Thanks for the article, i am also thinking the same and i think we need such mental approach to achieve the goal, thanks for the reference as well.
ReplyDeleteThis post makes me wonder about the 10% of colleagues who are dyslexic.
ReplyDeleteA recent TV programme reported that for dyslexics to read a text in their own language requires the same brain processing effort as it takes for a non-dyslexic to read a text in a foreign language.
Can I therefore conclude that perhaps the dyslexics amongst us, while sometimes taking longer to learn will actually learn to a deeper level (regardless of the font)?