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

All,

On 6/6/2011 6:32 PM, I wrote:

> Roger,
>
>>  A comment I would make
>>  about disfluency is that
>>  while it increased
>>  retention, it decreased
>>  confidence in putting the
>>  information to use.
>
> Can you give us a source for this?
>
> I, for one, would be interested in learning more.


And today Roger answered my question, telling me off-list that he had 
only the one source for this:

> the same article that Susan Smith alerted us to
> (in her original post 'Learning more from harder-to-read fonts') at
>
http://web.princeton.edu/sites/opplab/papers/Diemand-Yauman_Oppenheimer_2010.pdf
>
>
>
> On page 2 of the PDF the authors state:
>
>
>
> 'For example, Alter and his colleagues presented participants
>
> with logical syllogisms in either an easy- or difficult-to-
>
> read font. Participants were significantly less confident
>
> in their ability to solve the problems when the font was
>
> hard-to-read, however they were in reality significantly
>
> more successful.'


I'm ashamed to say I missed Roger's astute observation about this 
finding the first time I read it, probably because it dovetails neatly 
with my own belief that false confidence undermines all good things in 
this world. ;-)

In other words, I interpreted the passage to mean that students tend 
to be overconfident about their mastery of material presented in 
easy-to-read type, and that hard-to-read type can serve as a needed 
corrective for this.

Now that I read the passage again, I note that this is NOT what the 
authors say. (The conflation of confidence with overconfidence is mine 
alone.)

Even more now, than when I first read through the Princeton study, I 
wish the authors had said a lot more about the role of type in 
boosting or decreasing confidence.

At the very least, I wish they'd given more information about how they 
measured this loss of confidence, and whether or not the decrease was 
statistically significant (or perhaps they did somewhere, and I missed 
this, too?).


I have long thought that self-efficacy (which, following Albert Bandura

http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/efficacy.html

I generally prefer to "confidence") is a key factor in the kind of 
motivation that drives learning.

We all have to be pretty motivated to stick with something that's 
difficult to learn and/or do, and if we don't have personal experience 
with the many rewards of "failure" (especially initially), it can be 
hard, if not impossible, to persevere against our more immediate 
(pleasure-seeking) self-interests.

So I want to return to Roger's original point about typeface-induced 
loss of confidence (regarding putting what's been learned to use):

> While this may be an
> acceptable trade-off for
> students, in industries
> where customers are reading
> the text, this may not be
> a trade-off at all.

If we define confidence as "self-efficacy" rather than overconfidence, 
then I don't think its loss is any better for students in the 
classroom than it is for professionals trying to learn from the help 
manual how to change the background color of a bitmapped image in 
Photoshop.

(I can personally attest to the complete despair I gave into when 
unable to learn how to do the most basic of tasks in Photoshop. For 
years, I went to ridiculous extremes in order to avoid changing bg 
colors in Photoshop, until I finally learned from a friend -- who 
taught himself how to do it using CorelDRAW's PhotoPaint, because he 
couldn't figure it out in Photoshop either -- to use the SELECT (Color 
Range command) and EDIT (Fill command) menus in Photoshop, and NOT the 
Replace Color command, which sometimes mysteriously worked, but more 
often didn't. This particular SELECT + EDIT menu combination was *so* 
unintuitive to me that I spent years redesigning layouts and/or 
recreating graphics in order to avoid changing a bg color. My 
psychological block was absurd, I know ... but not, I'll bet, unique, 
especially for those of us who are disfluent when it comes to 
painting/drawing and photography.)

There is a school of thought out there that if you add play to 
learning, you can improve outcomes considerably. Here, I'm thinking of 
Jane McGonigal's recent book about gaming, _Reality Is Broken_, in 
which she argues that the gamer mindset has the power to fix our 
broken brick-and-mortar world.

E.g., from McGonigal's 20 Jan. 2011 interview on the U.S. public radio 
program, _Marketplace_:

	"What seems to me to be totally broken about reality is the
	difference between how we feel when we're playing our
	favorite games and how we feel in real life. When we're
	playing our favorite games, we feel like we are on a journey.
	We have a heroic purpose and we are ready to rise to the
	occasion. And in our real lives, we just don't have the sense
	that we can do something that matters, that we can have that
	impact, that we have the collaborators. And I'm really just
	looking for ways to take that incredible structure of games
	-- that put us on the path to save the world -- and bring it
	into the real world."

and

	"... So the first thing, I think this is the most important
	one when it comes to solving real-world problems, is they
	have an incredible resilience in the face of difficult
	challenges. So gamers spend 80 percent of their time failing
	in game worlds. They are not completing the mission, they're
	not leveling up, they didn't find the loot that they were
	looking for. And this is really remarkable. In real life, if
	we were spending 80 percent of our time failing at something,
	we would quit and go home. We would think we were bad and
	that would not be any fun. But gamers have this ability to
	keep their eye on a really ambitious goal."

complete interview at:
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2011/01/20/pm-playing-video-games-can-change-the-world/

with an excerpt on _Marketplace_'s Book Blog at:
http://www.publicradio.org/columns/marketplace/the-big-book/2011/01/excerpt-reality-is-broken.html

So maybe the Princeton study needs to go further and look at how the 
use of fun disfluent fonts (vs. Haettenschweiler-style induced 
disfluency) impacts confidence -- if at all -- as well as "deep 
processing".


Roger raised the question whether loss of confidence "in their ability 
to solve the problems" would be an acceptable trade-off in the 
workplace, and other non-classroom settings.

I would say, once again, that it depends on how we define confidence 
(self-efficacy? or overconfidence?).

The former we need; the latter, we don't.

Deborah
_____

Deborah Taylor-Pearce
[email protected]

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