The Daily Telegraph reports a study has found that more challenging fonts such as Monotype Corsiva - a flowing, italic typeface - had a positive impact on all school children but the effect was most significant with those suffering common learning difficulties.

The conclusions appear to contradict guidelines from the British Dyslexia Association which recommends that a plain, evenly spaced font such as Arial or Comic Sans should be used when working with dyslexics.  

The research follows research three years ago from Princeton University which found that the style and size of words had a major impact on students' ability to recall knowledge. The latest study was carried out by teachers at the fee-paying Clifton College in Bristol and published in the Journal of Educational Research.

In the new research pupils in physics and biology lessons were shown a slide at the start of the class that described eight facts about a fictional star - and were given 90 seconds to read the text in silence. Around half read the slide in Arial, with others given identical facts in the harder-to-read Monotype Corsiva font.

Students were not told that they would be tested on the content of the slides at the end of the class. But around 35 minutes later, pupils were asked a series of seven questions about the fictional star. Students were separated into ability groupings and marked out by teachers if they had a formal diagnosis of dyslexia.

The study said there was a "higher average score for pupils in every ability band when using the hard-to-read font".

Dyslexic pupils scored an average of 19 per cent higher in a memory test when using Monotype Corsiva compared with an Arial font. The average increase for pupils across all abilities was 13 per cent.

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Artwork is free! And best of all, we will not charge you anything for the artwork. Perhaps you have an idea for a sign you would like but you would prefer one of our designers to take your idea and turn it into a professional illustration for your signage, we can do that for you too. 

More information at:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/10089102/Hard-to-read-fonts-can-boost-pupil-results-by-up-to-a-fifth.html