Max likes to read a website called Slashdot. It basically posts snippets of news articles and links to where they can be found. It's not just any news. Max affectionately refers to it as "nerd news." Once in a while the site will post an article like this one from the BBC News that interests me, too (I suppose that makes me a nerd, also, but we all already knew that). The article asserts that difficult-to-read fonts facilitate better learning. The study was conducted in a lab at Princeton and later recreated at a high school where the results held. When I first read the title of the article, part of me wondered if it was just a time factor (more time spent figuring out the font = more time spent on the material). But the researchers are attributing the change to "disfluency"- difficulty associated with a mental task. They claim that this results in more concentration and deeper processing. As a student, I wish I had known about this sooner so that I could have switched up the fonts on some of my reading : ) Sadly as a first grade teacher who's teaching her students how to read (period) I don't think this news will come in handy.
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