Psychologists at Princeton and Indiana University may have found a financially cheap and logistically simple way to improve student performance. Their thesis is as initially counterintuitive as it is eventually reasonable: presenting material in a hard-to-read font will result in greater learning than presenting the same material in an easy-to-read font. Such a claim certainly runs counter to conventional wisdom. After all, shouldn’t educational material be presented to students in a visually clear and easy manner so that they focus solely on content?
For two reasons, the answer may be not necessarily. The first reason is that a hard-to-read font will lead readers to invest more effort and care into processing the material since reading is no longer easy and fluent. This deeper processing of a hard-to-read font will subsequently boost memory of the material because this deeper processing is the same procedure required for strong encoding and accurate retrieval. The second reason has to do with confidence. Students tend to be less confident about how well they’ve absorbed material when it’s presented in a hard-to-read font than when the material is an easy-to-read font. That lowered confidence may cause students to re-read the material; such additional exposure can boost their later memory of the material.
The psychologists put their thesis under empirical scrutiny at a Cleveland high school. Teachers used a hard-to-read font in PowerPoint Presentations and paper handouts in a random half of their sections. For the remaining sections in which the same teachers taught the same material and used the same exams, the same PowerPoint presentations and paper handouts were used except the font was easy to read. The results were clear and striking: students taught in a hard-to-read font outperformed their peers who were taught in an easy-to-read font.
This research is interesting and promising, but I don’t plan to apply it myself inside my classroom in New Orleans – at least not immediately. My focus as a first-year teacher will be to learn and apply proven strategies, not experiment with a novel one. Using a harder-to-read font in my future classroom may also backfire. The psychologists point out that students with behavioral or socioeconomic difficulties may become frustrated with and give up on material that’s in a hard-to-read font rather than process it deeply. The high school at which this research was done boasts a 95% attendance rate, a 98.6% graduation rate, and 9 in 10 graduates go on to college – very different from my elementary school, which was recently taken over by a charter school network because it was in such disarray. Plus, this research's applicability assumes a preexisting ability to read, something with which my special education students may struggle. But perhaps later in the school year when huge gains will have been made, using a hard-to-read font may be one strategy to raise student achievement.
Rory Sutherland, a jocular advertising executive with the Oglivy Group, gave TED talk in which he laments the commonly held notion that big problems require big, expensive solutions. For Mr. Sutherland, the world needs more people who have “immense amounts of power but no money at all.” Teachers, who aren’t a wealthy group as a whole, have the power to transform students’ lives amidst the huge problem of educational inequality. Though the research described here is nascent and its potential for positive impact uncertain, psychology might have introduced teachers to a tool that can help them better wield that power.
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