Want to Improve Content Retention? Make Your Fonts Harder to Read

The Research Digest Blog reports that Harder-to-Read Fonts Boost Student Learning. Researchers at Princeton first tested the effect in the lab and then replicated it in actual classrooms in a Ohio high school. Students who read worksheets, handouts, or PowerPoint slides with slightly harder-to-read fonts did better on tests of the material. Teacher's usual classroom materials were converted to the harder-to-read fonts "Comic Sans Italicised, Haettenschweiler or Monotype Corsiva, or, if the materials were hand-written, simply by shaking them about in a photo-copier to make them blurry."

Why does making something harder to read promote learning?

When people find something easy to read, they take that as a sign that they've mastered it. Conversely, the researchers believe harder-to-read fonts provoke a feeling of lack of mastery and encourage deeper processing. However, there's obviously a balance to be struck. If material becomes too difficult to read, some students may simply give up. 

The researchers think their finding could be the tip of the ice-berg as regards using cognitive findings to boost educational practice. 'If a simple change of font can significantly increase student performance, one can only imagine the number of beneficial cognitive interventions waiting to be discovered,' they said. 'Fluency demonstrates how small interventions have the potential to make big improvements in the performance of our students and education system as a whole.'