Learning difficulties

Making something hard to read means it is more likely to be remembered

Oct 14th 2010|

A PARADOX of education is that presenting information in a way that looks easy to learn often has the opposite effect. Numerous studies have demonstrated that when people are forced to think hard about what they are shown they remember it better, so it is worth looking at ways this can be done. And a piece of research about to be published in Cognition, by Daniel Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Princeton University, and his colleagues, suggests a simple one: make the text conveying the information harder to read.

This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “Learning difficulties”