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Gavan P.L. Watson

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Comic Sans

April Fools, Comic Sans and Learning

April 1, 2011 by Gavan Leave a Comment

Helvetica - Part 03
Creative Commons License photo credit: eanur0

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

Posted in: Educational Development Tagged: April Fools, Comic Sans, learning

About me

Gavan Watson headshot Work life? Director, Centre for Innovation in Teaching and Learning & Associate Vice President, Teaching and Learning at Memorial University with a Ph.D. in environmental education. Home life? Father, naturalist, photographer, husband, philosopher, & member of a hybrid human-dog pack.

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