It was only after hours of photocopying required readings that 2010 Princeton graduate Connor Diemand-Yauman, then a junior, realized that he had accidentally cut off the last few letters of each line.
Little did he know that through deciphering these readings, he would formulate an idea for his thesis that would ultimately be written about in The Economist, featured on BBC News and published in the psychology journal Cognition.
“When I began reading the poorly copied passages, I was surprised to notice that I was concentrating and retaining the material better than usual,” the former USG president explained in an e-mail.
The experience sparked his interest in disfluency, or the subjective feeling of difficulty associated with cognitive tasks — an experience which has been shown to allow for deeper mental processing. In his thesis, Diemand-Yauman manipulated a different variable that contributes to disfluency: font style. He ultimately found, through laboratory and classroom trials, that hard-to-read fonts allowed students to retain more information than easy-to-read fonts did.
Diemand-Yauman’s interest in disfluency coincided with those of his thesis adviser, psychology professor Daniel Oppenheimer, who worked with Diemand-Yauman to mold his personal experience into a rigorous study.
“Connor and I brainstormed possible thesis topics together for months,” Oppenheimer said. “The eventual thesis topic he worked on bore only a cursory resemblance to what he had initially thought of.”
Diemand-Yauman joined Oppenheimer’s research lab, and the two “met nearly every week — sometimes multiple times a week — and exchanged countless e-mails,” Oppenheimer said. He added that Diemand-Yauman also got feedback from other researchers after presenting at lab meetings.
The study had two phases.
In the first, researchers gave two groups of students 90 seconds to memorize information about fictional aliens that was presented in three different fonts: an easy-to-read font, Arial, and two difficult-to-read fonts, Comic Sans MS and Bodoni MT. In a quiz administered 15 minutes later, the group of students reading from a handout printed in a difficult-to-read font outperformed those reading from the easy-to-read handout by 14 percent.
The second phase looked at whether the results applied in the classroom. Students aged 15–18 in six different classes at an Ohio public school were given handouts that had been previously manipulated by University researchers, who formatted the handouts in different fonts. As in the first experiment, students learning from handouts in difficult-to-read fonts performed better on tests.
Despite the statistical significance of the results, the researchers acknowledged the study’s limitations, including that classroom subjects came from a high-performing school with well-trained teachers.
Diemand-Yauman also cautioned against making things too disfluent, as this “could potentially cause students to give up all together. Subtlety is the key.”
He added that he has been floored by the attention his research has received.
“I feel very honored to have worked so closely with Professor Oppenheimer on this project, and I am very happy about the publicity because I feel that this is a finding that educators need to know about,” he said.
While many educators believe that quality teaching depends on instinct and experience, Diemand-Yauman said that counterintuitive findings like his show that this is not the whole story.
Addressing the larger implications of this study on education, Oppenheimer explained, “Sometimes small interventions can have big effects on learning. The key take-home message of Connor’s work is that the research in cognitive psychology can be used to develop cost-effective ways of improving education.”