Science and Technology Education Learning difficulties

　　科技 教育 學習的難處

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

　　讀起來費勁記起來就容易

　　A PARADOX of education is that presenting information in a way that looks easy to learn often has the opposite effect.

　　關于教學有個看似矛盾之處：用一種看起來簡單的方式呈現信息通常會適得其反。

　　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.

　　大量研究已表明，如果能迫使人們費一番力氣去考慮他所看到的東西，那么他記憶的效果就會更好。所以，有哪些方法能讓人們去"費這個力氣"值得關注。

　　And a piece of research about to be published in Cognition, by Daniel Oppenheimer, apsychologist at Princeton University, and his colleagues, suggests a simple one: make the text conveying the information harder to read.

　　由普林斯頓大學心理學家，丹尼爾 奧本海默及其同事們共同完成的一項研究結果即將發表在《認知》雜志上，提出了一種很簡單的方法：讓傳達信息的文本讀起來更費勁一些。

　　Dr Oppenheimer recruited 28 volunteers aged between 18 and 40 and asked them to learn, from written descriptions, about three "species" of extraterrestrial alien, each of which had seven features.

　　奧本海默博士招募了28名年齡在18到40歲的志愿者，要求他們從書面文本的描述中學習關于三"種"外星生物的知識，其中每種生物又包含了七種特征。

　　This task was meant to be similar to learning about animal species in a biology lesson. It used aliens in place of actual species to be certain that the participants could not draw on priorknowledge.

　　這項任務旨在模擬生物課上學習動物種類的過程，它之所以用外星生物代替實際物種，是為了確保測試者不會憑借其原有的知識進行記憶。

　　Half of the volunteers were presented with the information in difficult-to-read fonts (12-pointComic Sans MS 75% greyscale and 12-point Bodoni MT 75% greyscale).

　　半數志愿者讀的信息是"難看"的字體(12磅，Comic Sans MS字體，灰度75%和12磅Bodoni字體，灰度75%)。

　　The other half saw it in 16-point Arial pure-black font, which tests have shown is one of the easiest to read.

　　另外半數讀的則是16磅大小、Arial純黑字體(這種字體經測試表明，讀起來最省力)。

　　Participants were given 90 seconds to memorise the information in the lists. They were then distracted with unrelated tasks for a quarter of an hour or so, before being asked questions about the aliens, such as "What is the diet of the Pangerish?"

　　所有測試者有90秒時間記住清單上的信息，然后進行大約15分鐘不相關的測試以分散他們的注意力，最后才提問他們關于外星生物的問題，例如"潘格里氏主要吃什么?"

　　and "What colour eyes does the Norgletti have?" The upshot was that those reading the Arial font got the answers right 72.8% of the time, on average. Those forced to read the more difficult fonts answered correctly 86.5% of the time.

　　，"諾格萊蒂的眼睛是什么顏色?"等等。結果，讀Arial字體的測試者平均有72.8%的正確率，而那些不得不費勁讀"難看"字體的測試者正確率則達到86.5%。

　　The question was, would this result translate from the controlled circumstances of the laboratory to the unruly environment of the classroom?

　　問題來了，在實驗室控制環境下得出的結果能否也適用于教室這種難以人為控制的環境呢?

　　It did. When the researchers asked teachers to use the technique in high-school lessons on chemistry, physics, English and history, they got similar results.

　　答案是肯定的。研究人員讓教師們將這種方式應用到高中的化學、物理、英語和歷史等課堂上，得到了類似的結果。

　　The lesson, then, is to make text books harder to read, not easier.

　　那么結論就是，應該把書本印得難讀一點，不要讓它看著那么舒服。