Study: Comic Sans Makes Learning Easier

(CANVAS STAFF REPORTS) - Comic Sans may find new popularity in academics as a study has found that making typefaces more difficult to read makes the information easier to remember.

Princeton University reported that a study led by associate professor of psychology and public affairs Daniel Oppenheimer found that publishing ideas in hard-to-read typefaces helps people retain concepts.

Oppenheimer worked with Princeton graduate Connor Diemand-Yauman and Ph.D. candidate Erikka Vaughan to assess if changing the font of written material could improve long-term learning and retention of information.

Their study focused on a concept called disfluency, which states that people process information better when something feels hard to do. They figured that would be true, predicting students would have to concentrate more in order to learn the material.

In one study, 28 participants between 18 and 40 years old were asked to learn about extraterrestrials. Some received easy fonts while others read more challenging ones.

Those who read in 16-point Arial pure black, considered an easy-to-read font, answered correctly 72.8 percent of the time. Students who read hard-to-read fonts such as 12-point Comic Sans MS or Bodoni MT got 86.5 percent of the questions right.

The second study took the project into a classroom in Chesterland, Ohio, where students reviewing with hard-to-read fonts scored better on regular classroom assessment tests.

"We weren't sure if our findings in the laboratory would hold up in the classroom, so we were pleasantly surprised," Diemand-Yauman told LiveScience .

Researchers also found that, along with getting better grades, the students who had the more difficult fonts didn't really notice fonts were switched.

LiveScience said there have been other studies showing students learn better when they struggle a bit. Examples are self-testing and leaving out letters in words such as p_pp_r and leaving it up to students to remember the vowels.

Researchers said changing fonts could boost students' performance.

Jonah Lehrer, a Wired.com blogger, praised the study and compared it to his earlier post about e-readers making reading too easy. He suggested that the clarity of e-readers like the Kindle and iPad could have a trade-off if the information is so easy to read that "the sentences will be quickly forgotten."

The blog Gawker.com joked that this shows the "horrifically font" Comic Sans, used in different forms in many of the tests, may actually have a benefit.