Funky fonts help kids remember things better

Washington: Does your child find it difficult to remember important lessons. Then, try to get those printed in Comic Sans, as scientists say funky fonts help students learn better.

Fonts, or styles of typeface, that are relatively difficult to read -- including the much-maligned Comic Sans -- help people learn new information little easier, found the new study.

The font effect works both in lab experiments and in real classrooms, perhaps by forcing students to work harder to process the information, the researchers said.

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

People generally assume that the easier it is to learn something, the easier it will be to remember the information later. But education research has shown that in many cases, it's the struggle that makes information stick.

For example, remembering the word "pepper" is easier when you first see it as p_pp_r and fill in the vowels yourself, the researchers said in a paper published in the journal Cognition.

The researchers, wanted to know whether switching from easy-to-read fonts to more-difficult ones would create a desirable difficulty and improve learning.

For this, they recruited 28 volunteers who were given information about three made-up alien species with strange names, such as 'pangerish' or 'norgletti'.

Volunteers got a list of alien names and characteristics and had 90 seconds to memorise which characteristic matched which species.

Some of the lists were typed in an easy-to-read font, Arial, while others, the disfluent lists, were typed in either Comic Sans MS or Bodini MT.

After 90 seconds, the volunteers were distracted for 15 minutes, then were tested how much they remember the aliens.

It was found that those who read the disfluent lists averaged 14 percentage points higher than those who read the list in Arial.

In another experiment, the researchers changed the course materials of over 200 students from a public school in Ohio.

It was found that like in the lab, funky fonts made study more effective. The students who learned with difficult fonts got better grades and didn't seem to notice the font switch, the researchers found.