经济学人108:读起来费劲记起来就容易

 　　Science and Technology Education Learning difficulties

　　科技 教育 学习的难处

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

　　读起来费劲记起来就容易

　　A PARADOX¹ of education is that presenting information in a way that looks easy to learn often has the opposite effect.

　　关于教学有个看似矛盾之处：用一种看起来简单的方式呈现信息通常会适得其反。

　　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，如果能迫使人们费一番力气去考虑他所看到的东西，那么他记忆的效果就会更好。所以，有哪些方法能让人们去"费这个力气"值得关注。

　　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.

　　由普林斯顿大学心理学家，丹尼尔 奥本海默及其同事们共同完成的一项研究结果即将发表在《认知》杂志上，提出了一种很简单的方法：让传达信息的文本读起来更费劲一些。

　　Dr Oppenheimer recruited 28 volunteers aged² between 18 and 40 and asked them to learn, from written descriptions, about three "species" of extraterrestrial alien, each of which had seven features.

　　奥本海默博士招募了28名年龄在18到40岁的志愿者，要求他们从书面文本的描述中学习关于三"种"外星生物的知识，其中每种生物又包含了七种特征。

　　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 prior knowledge.

　　这项任务旨在模拟生物课上学习动物种类的过程，它之所以用外星生物代替实际物种，是为了确保测试者不会凭借其原有的知识进行记忆。

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

　　半数志愿者读的信息是"难看"的字体（12磅，Comic Sans MS字体，灰度75%和12磅Bodoni字体，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.

　　另外半数读的则是16磅大小、Arial纯黑字体（这种字体经测试表明，读起来最省力）。

　　Participants were given 90 seconds to memorise³ 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?"

　　所有测试者有90秒时间记住清单上的信息，然后进行大约15分钟不相关的测试以分散他们的注意力，最后才提问他们关于外星生物的问题，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.

　　，"诺格莱蒂的眼睛是什么颜色？"等等。结果，读Arial字体的测试者平均有72.8%的正确率，而那些不得不费劲读"难看"字体的测试者正确率则达到86.5%。

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

　　问题来了，在实验室控制环境下得出的结果能否也适用于教室这种难以人为控制的环境呢？

　　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。研究人员让教师们将这种方式应用到高中的化学、物理、英语和历史等课堂上，得到了类似的结果。

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

　　那么结论就是，应该把书本印得难读一点，不要让它看着那么舒服。

1 paradox   

n.似乎矛盾却正确的说法；自相矛盾的人(物)

参考例句：

• The story contains many levels of paradox.这个故事存在多重悖论。
• The paradox is that Japan does need serious education reform.矛盾的地方是日本确实需要教育改革。

2 aged   

adj.年老的，陈年的

参考例句：

• He had put on weight and aged a little.他胖了，也老点了。
• He is aged,but his memory is still good.他已年老，然而记忆力还好。

3 memorise   

vt.记住，熟记

参考例句：

• An actor must be able to memorise his lines.演员须善于熟记台词。
• I shall try to memorise all these phrases.我要熟记所有这些词组。