Diemand- Yauman et al (2011) argued that educational strategies are sometimes based on beliefs about how to facilitate learning which are not always tested out and may even turn out to be wrong. One belief is that reading material presented in perceptually fluent fonts such as Calibri is easier to absorb than material presented in perceptually disfluent fonts such as Lucida Handwriting or Impact. The belief seems to be that clarity of font somehow allows students to conserve their cognitive resources so that they have more left over to expend on memorising. Indeed students do subjectively experience material in a disfluent font as more difficult to read but Diemand- Yauman et al found that it is better remembered than the same material in fluent font. Although it seems counter-intuitive, making things harder to do an sometimes improve…show more content… In the first study they devised novel material to be remembered consisting of 21 facts about three kinds of alien such as their height, eye colour and diet. Twenty eight participants each spent 90 seconds learning this material which was presented in one of two grayscale, disfluent fonts or one black fluent font. This was followed by 15 minutes of distraction tasks after which participants were asked a random selection of 7 questions about the aliens. In the fluent condition participants answered 72.8% of questions correctly compared to 86.5% in the disfluent conditions, a difference which was statistically significant. In the second study the researchers collected test performance scores following lessons using original teaching materials and compared them with scores following lessons in which the same materials were used but had been converted into one of three disfluent fonts or unclearly copied. In all cases and across a range of subjects and ability levels, retention was better in the disfluency
