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

Rob,

> Erm... Irony alert!

FWIW, I did get -- and thoroughly enjoy! -- the irony (here and 
elsewhere).

One of the problems with these kinds of discussions is that 
long-winded people like me want to reply to everything everybody's 
said, and it's just not possible (thankfully for the rest of you ;-).

In this case, after thinking about other responses and themes raised 
during the course of discussion, I fixed on your ironic paragraph as 
the quickest way in to what I wanted to say about motivation, and 
frustrated learning, and "disfluency" transferred beyond the classroom 
to more "naturalistic" settings (where we all become the test subjects 
of our own study).

I admit: my metonymic substitutions are not ideal, but it's the best I 
can do when in a hurry and responding on the fly.

That said, it's good that you question my assumptions (or at least 
"problematize" them, as we literary critics like to say ;-).


On a related note -- here thinking of how Charles just brought us back 
to the educational context with which Sue and the Princeton study are 
most concerned -- I wanted to pass on the following link:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education/jan-june11/schools_06-06.html

for a segment originally aired last night (6/6/2011) on the _PBS 
NewsHour_, titled

	"Grading Schools: How to Determine the 'Good' From the 'Bad'?"

	SUMMARY:
	"Students get graded by test scores, but how do we best
	determine if a school is 'good' or 'bad'? Education
	Correspondent John Merrow examines that question."

Merrow's feature is NOT about type-related disfluency.

But it is about the difficulties of teaching reading, assessing 
outcomes, and measuring learning.

And it provides a real-life context for the Princeton study ... one 
that should give us all pause.

Deborah
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Deborah Taylor-Pearce
[email protected]
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