Too hard to read. “Fortune favours the Bold (and the Italicised): Effects of disfluency on educational outcomes”

Educational outcomes, according to researchers at Princeton Universities Department of Psychology, may be influenced just as much by the type-font used in printed material, than the teacher’s skill and experience. These research findings, on the effect of suitable type-fonts and learning, may have considerable merit and are worth exploring further.

The two research studies, covered in the article “Fortune favours the Bold (and the Italicised): Effects of disfluency on educational outcomes, present the case that sometimes, making the text harder to read, can help improve long-term learning and information retention. The research proposes, “more cognitive engagement leads to deeper processing, which facilitates encoding and subsequently better retrieval”.

Typefaces used in the research were Haettenschweiler - Monotype Corsiva and Comic Sans Italicised. Fonts were sometimes “greyed” to make reading more difficult.

The full text, on this type-font story can be found as a .pdf document by Googling - “Effects of disfluency on educational outcomes”

Readers should note, that is widely known that readers with Irlen Syndrome, some poor, or dyslexic readers, can have difficulty with type-fonts, leading to an inability to read, or disengage from reading because of difficulties. Serif type-faces and black ink on white paper can also be difficult for some dyslexic readers.

For further reading on Irlen Syndrome and underachieving students, please review the research article in this edition Visual Perceptual Difficulties by Fiona de Buitlier.

A savings bonus for schools choosing to use grey text - a 50% ink coverage - instead of solid black text -100% ink coverage - means that ink consumption, or copy toner usage is reduced.