Re: Learning more from harder-to-read fonts?

Charles wrote:

> I'm disappointed that no one else has commented on your post! 
<snip - discussion of the article>

We've had a couple of comments not, but I thought I'd explain why I didn't
comment previously (and it was primarily because I didn't have the right
expertise, I'm afraid).

I wanted to comment because I'm pretty outraged by the idea that
deliberately formatting things to be harder to read might encourage
learning. I even started to write a post that ranted about the paper
somewhat. Then I thought I'd better read it :-)

The authors do address some of my immediate concerns. The first part of
their experiment was silly, equating 'learning' with 'ability to retain
random made-up "facts" for 15 minutes'.  

The second part was a lot more interesting. So far as I can make out, they
gathered real teaching materials from actual teachers in a high school
setting. Then they reformatted some of them, and assigned the materials
back. Then they found that the classes with the harder-to-read materials
achieved better results (slightly).

Now, I'm still highly sceptical about all this. The reasons I held off from
commenting here were:

1. I'm not sure I'm really understanding the statistics. Anyone here feel
confident about reading the stats argument? I *think* I'm seeing that
although the results are 'statistically significant', the effect size is
small and not necessarily all in the same direction. And I *think* I'm not
seeing anything about dispersion. For example: suppose that the 'easier'
condition results in a slightly lower performance overall but with fewer
extreme results (very bad or very good) and the 'harder' condition results
in a slightly higher performance overall but with more extreme results, then
I'd say: it's better to avoid some really bad performances, at the expense
of a slightly lower overall performance. 

2. I'm not sure I'm really following the argument about randomisation. I
think you'd have to be a particularly visually insensitive teacher to fail
to notice that you're using teaching materials that have been manipulated to
be hard to read. So, I'd suspect that those teachers might very well teach
in a slightly different way, to help their students to overcome those
difficulties. So we might be looking at a classic Hawthorne effect rather
than a legibility effect.

3. I just didn't have time to puzzle through the paper at the level of
detail to deal with points 1 and 2 above.

What I do know, is that this rather thoughtful and somewhat limited
experiment has, as usual, become a blanket assertion in the media that
badly-formatted things are easier to learn from. Which is manifest nonsense.

Best
Caroline Jarrett
Twitter @cjforms
http://www.designtoread.com

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