April Fools, Comic Sans and Learning
With Comic Sans (a font, for those not in typographic know) taking centre stage in many of today‘s web-related April Fools jokes, it’s worth highlighting some research that might have you re-thinking your derision of the font.
Earlier this year, researchers published finding that suggest that “information in hard-to-read fonts was better remembered than easier to read information in a controlled laboratory setting”. Of course (if you see where I’m going with this) one such “hard-to-read” font used in this work was Comis Sans. While there was no significant difference found in retention between the use of the hard-to-read fonts, the study suggests that learning (information retention & recall) is improved when students are forced into the added challenge that Comic Sans (and other crappy fonts) provides.
So the only logical conclusion to this is:
Format all your teaching material in Comic Sans!
Source: Diemand-Yauman, C., et al. Fortune favors the BOLD (and the italicized): Effects of disfluency on educational outcomes. Cognition (2010), doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2010.09.012