Does hard to read mean easy to learn?

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.

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