What Educators Can Learn from Madison Avenue -Bad Design Kills

Jonah Lehrer recently wrote about the educational benefits of "ugly fonts", but though the research is a good, it's not really the case that they're ugly. What they are is novel. And novelty is usually a good thing when you have something you want remembered.

In this Princeton study, 18-40 year old test subjects were allowed to read short descriptions of aliens either in a "disfluent font" like Comic Sans or Bodoni (top right) or a "fluent font" like Arial (bottom right).

After a 15 minute delay, participants were able to recall 14% more information if it was presented in the disfluent.

Now Madison Avenue and even the US government have known for some time that font shape, size, and color make a difference in terms of what one notices and remembers, Isn't it time for teachers to catch on, especially if they want their students to remember better?

A future study of course should be with younger students and we would hope dyslexics. Many dyslexics and people working with dyslexic students have noticed that font and color can affect both readability and memorability for text.

Young children learning to read are often confronted with early readers with homogeneously looking words in chubby fonts like the one above from Starfall. If the words are closer together, it may be almost unreadable.

Not ever child has problems, but in our experience, those with limited visual spans do - so much in fact that they may see an increase in their reading abilities if switched to different fonts or even more challenging early readers in which word length vary. If these kids are older late readers who have a strong listened vocabulary, then they may quickly progress with books like Geronimo Stilton (above) that have fairly challenging vocabulary, but visual cues and elaborated fonts to aid the decoding process.

Hopefully the publishers of educational curriculum will catch up to all this. Visual perception principles are not just for wonky science aficionados. They're what we need for the classroom.

Verbal vs. Visual Problem Solving in the Brain

In this research of fMRI problem solving from researchers in Indiana, adoption of a verbal / algebraic vs. visual strategy had similar patterns of activation in brain networks, but the visual strategy was less demanding on working memory, and visual strategies were preferred more often from students who had working memory limitations.

Which strategy would you choose?

The month after April is the month before my favorite month. What is my favorite month?

It's also interesting that individuals with more limited working memory tended to have a reduced reading span (mild dyslexia?).

One question that comes to mind is whether most algebra or logic teachers would teach verbally or algebraically rather than visually. And if so, is that why students with more limited working memories or those with a bias toward spatial problem solving may be being left behind?

Studies such as these are very basic, but surprisingly there are still some educational pedagogues who suggest that teachers should not tailor instruction to different types of learners.

Stories, Empathy, and the Brain

Want an empathy workout for your brain? Read a book!


At right the blue shows activation patterns associated with emotional comprehension (blue) and perspective taking (yellow) when reading a story.

It turns out, when we read an emotional work, we activate a complex mentalizing network in order to think about the mental state of another person. Imagining a person in a different place takes more brain power (reading slows) and also activates the spatial network necessary to set up a scene in the brain.

No wonder reading complex novels with all their differing personalities, motives, and scenarios can be an exhausting process.

If we want to train children up in empathy, then stories are a great way to do it. Seeing the complexity of the pathways required for empathizing should help us understand why people with sensory processing challenges have such difficulty projecting themselves into stories and empathizing with different story characters. But this spatial network can be trained and research suggests empathy can also improve.

From Harvard's Mass General, 8 weeks of a meditation-mindfulness stress reduction course showed changes in cortical networks like this story network associated with empathy, sense of self, and stress.