Daniel Oppenheimer and Erikka Vaughan at Princeton did a study to figure out whether changing the font of written material could improve the long-term learning and retention of information presented to students - they did this with both university and high school students.
Students reviewing material in hard-to-read fonts did better on regular classroom assessment tests than did their randomly selected counterparts reading the same material in easier fonts.
The hard-to-read fonts were Haettenschweiler, Monotype Corsiva or Comic Sans Italicized. The control was whatever the teacher had been using previously -- usually Times New Roman or Arial.
You can read more about the study at http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S28/82/93O80/index.xml?section=topstories or the published findings in the journal, Cognition.
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