Those Crazy Fonts We Use

By now, this study (PDF) by a team of psychology researchers from Princeton and Indiana University has stirred up some interesting press (and plenty of "I knew it" nodding of heads amongst the Head First team) given the unusual results. Students asked to memorize relatively foreign material (characteristics of "aliens") performed better on recall tests if they were presented the study materials in fonts like Comic Sans (a font we often take a lot of flak for using in our books), which is notoriously harder to read than a more traditional font like Arial. The differentiators weren't size or formatting like bolding or italics, but rather the difficulty of reading the font itself.

One of the study authors, Daniel M. Oppenheimer, recently said in the New York Times, "The reason that the unusual fonts are effective is that it causes us to think more deeply about the material. Think of it this way, you can't skim material in a hard to read font, so putting text in a hard-to-read font will force you to read more carefully."

The implications for Head First books is almost comically clear (apologies). Often you may note that we reinforce key teaching points on a page in a big, funky font. We use Comic Sans, and we're not afraid to admit it. It turns out we're not just admirers of (potentially otherwise) bad fonts. There's some real cognitive science method to our madness.

I found one other interesting nugget related to this result in that same NYT article (which I originally thought was just going to be a rehash of the font study results). It quoted a series of experiments conducted in 1996 by researchers at Macalester College and New York University who were interested in whether prior exposure to answers for an exam would indeed positively impact student's performance on exams. Not that surprisingly, they found a positive correlation. But they found something even more interesting along the way--the nature of the preparatory information had an even more profound impact. To wit:

"In one experiment, researchers found that participants studying a difficult chapter on the industrial uses of microbes remembered more when they were given a poor outline -- which they had to rework to match the material -- than a more accurate one."

Now we're not suggesting that we give you "poor" material when it comes to Head First, but we do let you screw up occasionally. And we do so on purpose. Finding something that isn't working and figuring out why proves to be a far more compelling (and successful) learning strategy than just being handed the answers up front.

Would you agree? Are our bad fonts and FUBAR moments part of what makes Head First work well for you?