What Font Size Is Recommended for First Grade Reading Books

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Enquiry Article

The Effect of Font Size on Reading Comprehension on 2nd and 5th Grade Children: Bigger Is Not Always Better

• Tami Katzir,
• Shirley Hershko,
• Vered Halamish

ten

• Published: September 19, 2013
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0074061

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Abstruse

Research on reading evolution has focused on the linguistic, cognitive, and recently, metacognitive skills children must master in order to learn to read. Less focus has been devoted to how the text itself, namely the perceptual features of the words, affects children'due south learning and comprehension. In this study, we manipulated perceptual properties of text by presenting reading passages in different font sizes, line lengths, and line spacing to 100 children in the second and fifth grades. For 2nd graders (Experiment 1), decreasing font size, as well as increasing line length, yielded significantly lower comprehension scores. Line spacing had no effect on performance. For 5th graders (Experiment ii), decreasing font size yielded higher comprehension scores, all the same in that location were no effects for line length and line spacing. Results are discussed inside a "desirable difficulty" arroyo to reading evolution.

Citation: Katzir T, Hershko Due south, Halamish V (2013) The Effect of Font Size on Reading Comprehension on Second and Fifth Grade Children: Bigger Is Non E'er Ameliorate. PLoS I 8(nine): e74061. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0074061

Editor: Luis K Martinez, CSIC-Univ Miguel Hernandez, Spain

Received: April 19, 2013; Accepted: July 28, 2013; Published: September 19, 2013

Copyright: © 2013 Katzir et al. This is an open-access article distributed nether the terms of the Creative Eatables Attribution License, which permits unrestricted apply, distribution, and reproduction in whatsoever medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: The authors have no support or funding to report.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

Consider the subjective experience of a second grader reading a text, poorly photocopied and written in a pocket-size font. In dissimilarity, imagine her reading big print, centered on the folio, and subjectively easy to read. Intuitively, one may recollect that these perceptual and typographical factors are only related to the child's motivation to read and will not affect her comprehension. Very little enquiry has focused on potential developmental furnishings of manipulating concrete properties of print (e.g., print size, font type, etc.) [1-3]. In adults, for example, it has been found that altering text presentation to a less familiar format, hence making it less perceptually fluent (words in italics) led to better retentivity of studied material in adults and loftier school students [ane]. Using a different manipulation of text, some other study found that actress large letter spacing enhanced the functioning of give-and-take reading in children with dyslexia [3]. Currently, due to scarce enquiry, all that can be ended is that the furnishings of altering text presentation may differ by the specific manipulation and past population. Information technology may also touch different aspects of reading: charge per unit, accurateness and comprehension. In this study, we focus on an understudied question which is, tin a mere manipulation of perceptual features of text raise reading comprehension among second and fifth grade children.

Reading Development and Reading Comprehension

Developmental models of reading assume that reading is fabricated upwards of component skills [4-6]. These components begin with letter-audio recognition and then proceed to decoding skills. While each component is sufficient for a fourth dimension, new skills must be accomplished if reading proficiency is to increment. Later components include the development of efficiency, comprehension, and the ability to integrate and synthesize materials.

Children are assumed to progress from learning well-nigh print itself to learning about the alphabet, sounds of the letters, and alphabetic character groups [4]. During the initial period of learning to decode, in the offset and second grades, the reader is "glued to the print." Reading is ho-hum and laborious, as new readers still receive many cues almost how to decode words from the letters themselves. By reading cloth that has familiar content and language style, children develop the ability to employ context to decipher words, as well as fluent and effortless reading. Past 4th class, children are expected to exist efficient readers, reading rapidly, comprehending complex materials, and making inferences about the text [4,vii,8]. A greater reliance on significant is also axiomatic. Characteristics of children in fourth grade and above include the ability to concentrate less on the impress and more on details and ideas. This developmental shift has been referred to as a shift from learning to read to reading in order to acquire [four].

The ultimate goal of reading evolution is efficient reading comprehension, defined as a process of extracting and amalgam meaning through interaction and interest with written language [9]. What factors determine reading comprehension? Empirical testify demonstrates that phonological processing, rapid automatized naming, orthographic processing, and word identification [7], as well every bit IQ [x], memory and attention [11], and higher social club processes [12], all predict a meaning portion of the variance in reading comprehension. However, even when these measures are entered into regression models, much of the variance in reading comprehension remains unexplained [xiii].

These findings have resulted in a shift towards a multi-dimensional view of reading comprehension that goes beyond cerebral and linguistic processes. The RAND model of reading comprehension [14] suggests that in order to empathize the complex procedure of comprehension there is a need to concurrently examine a triangulation of the contribution of reader characteristics, text blazon, and environmental factors [13,xv,8,9]. Interestingly, while much work has focused on the influence of the nature of the text type on reading (e.g., narrative vs. expository text) [xiv], very little work has focused on the typographical properties of text presentation. Could altering the perceptual features of the words, such as font size, line spacing, etc.', actually lead to performance differences in reading comprehension? A central assumption in the reading comprehension literature is that in order to improve comprehension, the reader must improve his skills (e.g., phonological skill, vocabulary, decoding abilities, reading rate). However, what if comprehension can be improved by simply changing factors that are external to the reader, such every bit the typographical properties of the text, without changing its content? The current written report was designed to accost these questions.

The Furnishings of Manipulating Perceptual Presentation on Cognitive Functioning

Many instruction researchers believe that reducing extraneous cognitive load is always benign for the learning state of affairs. If a student was able to larn new information easily, both the pupil and the teacher are likely to label the session as successful regardless of whether the student is able to retrieve the information subsequently [xvi]. However, enquiry in cognitive psychology suggests merely the opposite. In many cases, the more than challenging a learning session is, the better subsequent long term memory for the textile studied in that session will be [17]. It may be that greater cognitive engagement leads to deeper processing, which then facilitates encoding and subsequent retrieval [18]. Thus, it has been found that the near constructive learning strategies involve introducing difficulties for the learner. Ane clear example of a "desirable difficulty" [17,19] is the interleaving of to-be-learned materials, rather than blocking them, in a way that creates, at least temporarily, contextual interference for the learner [twenty]. Interleaving has been found to produce stronger learning than blocking, at least in the long run.

Even so some other way to brand learning more than challenging is to dispense disfluency, the subjective metacognitive feel of difficulty associated with cognitive tasks. Disfluency has been found to be strongly related to confidence in the ability to remember new information [21], with greater disfluency yielding lower confidence. In plough, when learners are less confident in how well they have learned the material, they are more likely to engage in more effortful and elaborative processing [22]. Indeed, disfluency has been shown to bear upon cerebral processing independently of actual cognitive difficulty (for case, the corporeality of textile to be studied) [23]. For example, a recent study has demonstrated that creating disfluency by presenting words upside-down for study enhanced later retrieve for these words, compared to words that were presented right-side upward [24]. Information technology has also been shown that disfluency leads people to process information more than carefully [25] and yields improve oral comprehension [26]. Based on the above findings, we heighten the following questions: Tin can manipulating perceptual features of text, which take been shown to create disfluency effects in adults, also lead to better reading comprehension in children? Volition the effects of the manipulation depend on stages of reading development?

The Developmental Effects of Manipulating Perceptual Presentation of Text

Manipulations of perceptual features of text build upon the assumption that the visual system makes utilize of relative size every bit a perceptual cue that conveys important information regarding the proximity of a stimulus [27]. Oppenhiemer and his colleagues manipulated perceptual presentation of text simply by adopting fonts that were more difficult to read [1,28] past choosing faded shades, modest fonts, and unclear photocopying of text. A different mode to manipulate text presentation and create text disfluency may be to manipulate the spacing between lines and line lengths, under the supposition that these changes pose greater challenge for readers [29].

Manipulating text presentation may touch on reading rate and accurateness [29] as well as feeling of proficiency. Indeed, studies focusing on feelings of proficiency, mainly in adults, report that processing words presented in larger fonts was subjectively more fluent than processing words presented in smaller fonts [30,31]. Importantly, it has been found that elementary interventions, such equally presenting educational materials on PowerPoint slides and handouts in italics (which children are less accustomed to) as opposed to presenting the aforementioned text in a standard, non-italesized format, engaged both university and high school students in more than elaborative processing and even subsequently resulted in improved educational outcomes, including higher grades [1]. In contrast, a report of discussion lists showed that font size did not affect recall [performance] amidst university students, though it did touch their judgment of learning, with larger fonts associated with greater estimations of remembrance [32]. In these studies the participants were all skilled readers that were passed the initial phases of reading development. All the same, the upshot of such manipulations may be different for poor readers too as for younger children.

Studies of adults that have taken into account variability in reading skills have found that manipulating text presentation has opposite effects on good and poor readers. Thus, increasing text difficulty by deleting messages led poor readers to evidence decreased recall, whereas skilful readers showed improved recall with letter deletion [33]. Based on these findings, we advise that manipulating perceptual presentation of text might take differential effects on reading comprehension for skilled versus novice readers.

The majority of studies manipulating perceptual presentation of text in children have manipulated font size and line length and examined the effects on reading rate and accuracy and take not looked at its effect on reading comprehension. Interestingly, studies that examined font size found different effects for children at different stages of reading evolution: A relatively minor font size was institute to decrease the reading rates of five- to seven-year-olds, but had no effect on children in third to 5th grade [34]. Similarly, some other report compared the reading rates of children with dyslexia in 2d through quaternary grade and reading-level matched controls [35]. Dyslexic children benefited from larger fonts while their reading-level matched peers, like to the results of college students previously described [32], showed no font size furnishings on reading rate and accuracy.

Regarding line length, in a study on six-twelvemonth-olds, no differences were found in reading rate and accuracy betwixt short and long lines, controlling for the number of words in a line [36]. However, another study institute that big fonts were read as well as smaller fonts with big spacing betwixt the words (which results in longer lines) [37]. Since there were no conclusive results across the ii studies, and as line length and font size were meantime manipulated in this study, conclusions cannot be fatigued regarding each factor in relation to reading rate and accuracy.

Furthermore, the only study that looked at the effects of manipulating text presentation on reading comprehension, in children found that fonts with decorations (i.e., disfluent fonts) were comprehended equally well as fonts without them [29]. Nonetheless, based on the findings of the effects of font size and line length on rate and accurateness of sentence reading, nosotros would except they may also influence reading comprehension. Such data may accept far reaching practical implications. Equally reading comprehension required the orchestration of many subskills [38], and an interaction between reader and text, information technology is important to study the effects of text presentation beyond the reading speed and accurateness level. Thus while charge per unit and accurateness are necessary for comprehension, they are not sufficient. Factors that influence them may influence comprehension in a different manner.

To summarize, creating less attainable perceptual presentation of text, or disfluent text (smaller fonts, less spacing) was found to have different effects on the reading speed and accuracy of skilled versus unskilled readers. In terms of size, larger font size enhanced reading speed and accuracy of younger and dyslexic readers and showed no effect on older children. In add-on, it did not bear on recall in older university students. However, bolding or italicizing text did improve long-term memory in older high school and academy students. To the extent that text presentation affects reading rate and accuracy, we would look information technology to influence reading comprehension besides. Thus, we hypothesized that for younger readers, manipulating text presentation by increasing disfluency compared to the standard text they are used to would impede comprehension, as they yet receive important contextual cues from the impress. For older children, who have already mastered the decoding and efficiency stages and thus rely less on bodily visual cues, nosotros hypothesized that increased disfluency (less familiar and accessibly text presentation) would part as a desirable difficulty, resulting in deeper processing and thereby increasing comprehension.

The Electric current Experiments

In the current experiments, we examined the effect of perceptual fluency on reading comprehension in second and 5th grade children (Experiments ane and ii, respectively). Specifically, we asked whether font size, line length, and line spacing would affect operation on a reading comprehension task. In improver, we asked whether these factors would differentially affect children in earlier versus later stages of reading evolution.

Experiment 1: Second Grade

Experiment i was designed to examine how the perceptual disfluency of text, created by decreasing font size, increasing line length, and decreasing line spacing, affects reading comprehension amongst second graders.

Method

Participants.

Participants were 45 second graders (xx girls, mean historic period 7.5 years) from simple schools in Israel, mostly of middle- and upper-eye-class socioeconomic background. All children had rapid naming, reading and verbal abilities in the boilerplate range, based on standardized measures [39,40].

The inquiry conducted in this paper was approved by the academy review lath - The Ethics Committee Review Board-IRB. The members of the Helsinki committee in our university are Shoshi Zalka and Avi Karni. Informed written consent was obtained from the parents and children, also, the information were analyzed anonymously). Finally, the investigation was conducted according to the principles expressed in the Announcement of Helsinki.

Materials.

To examine reading comprehension, nosotros developed a tool that included 4 age-appropriate texts, matched for level of difficulty and length. The texts were adapted from previous national reading cess materials and were 44-47 words long. We manipulated iii dimensions betwixt the texts: font size, line length, and spacing between lines. The dimensions of the baseline text—20 pt font size, 4.ii inch line length, double line spacing—represented the text dimensions that are used for national reading assessment for the second grade, and reflected the typical font size, line length, and line spacing used in textbooks for this grade. For the other three texts, we manipulated presentation by decreasing font size in i text by 20%; increasing line length in some other text by 20%; and decreasing line spacing by twenty% in the concluding text. The consignment of each specific text to 1 of the 4 dimensions, as well every bit the order of text presentation, was counterbalanced across participants. For ecological reasons, texts were presented to children in a booklet. The design was self paced, as to ensure children are reading in their natural pace that is well-nigh comfy for them.

After reading each text, students were asked to answer iv multiple choice reading comprehension questions that were developed especially for the current written report. Prior to conducting the study, the texts and questions were given to 10 judges, all with chief's degrees in literacy, to assess that they are indeed age-appropriate. The reliability of the tool, as examined in a pilot written report with 51 children, was high (Cronbach'south α = .756).

Procedure.

The consent of the parents, the children, and of the school was obtained before starting time the written report. Children were first tested individually in a quiet room at school to determine reading and vocabulary levels. Next, there was a group administration of the reading comprehension tool. Children were told they would be asked to read several passages and answer some questions well-nigh them. They had up to thirty minutes to complete the entire task.

Results

For each participant, nosotros calculated an overall reading comprehension score for each text by computing the proportion of reading comprehension questions answered correctly out of four. Results are presented in Effigy 1. The analysis yielded a significant effect of font size on reading comprehension: second graders had college comprehension scores on the standard font-size text (.87) than the small font-size text (.79), t(43) = 2.32, p< .05, Cohen's d = .35. The assay also yielded a pregnant upshot of line length: Second graders had higher comprehension scores on the standard font-size text than the big line-length text (.74), t(xl) = 3.35, p< .01, Cohen's d = .54. Comparing reading comprehension betwixt the standard text and the modest spacing text did not yield a meaning consequence, t(43) = one.00, ns, Cohen'due south d = .153.

Experiment two: Fifth Form

The results of Experiment one support the prediction that for young children learning to read, increasing the perceptual disfluency of text, by decreasing font size or increasing line length, impairs comprehension. Experiment ii was designed to examine the hypothesis that the opposite pattern, i.due east., increased comprehension for more disfluent texts, would emerge for older children in fifth grade.

Method

Participants.

Participants were 45 fifth graders (24 girls, hateful age 10.5 years) drawn from the same schools as the participants in Experiment 1. All children had reading and verbal abilities in the boilerplate range, based on standardized measures [39,40]. See Tabular array 1.

	Second Grade Children		Fifth Grade children
	Mean (SD)	Min-Max	Hateful (SD)	Min-Max
PPVT SS	93.7 (5.two)	85-130	93.33 (3.2)	83-124
Give-and-take Reading SS	109 (five.1)	88-122	105 (6.nine)	87-116
Naming Speed Raw	39 sec (8.6)	26-58	thirty.00sec (5.6)	18-42

Table 1. Descriptive statistics for PPVT, Rapid Naming, and Word Reading from Alef advertising Taf for 2d and 5th grade children (N = 45 & 45, respectively).

Materials and Process.

To examine reading comprehension, we developed a tool that was equivalent to the ane used in Experiment 1 simply adapted for fifth graders by employing the following changes: (1) the 4 age-advisable texts were adjusted from previous national reading assessment materials for the fifth form and were 110-120 words long; (two) the dimensions of the baseline text represented the text dimensions that are used for national reading assessment for the fifth class, and reflected the typical font size, line length, and line spacing used in textbooks for this form—13 pt font size, 4.6 inch line length, one and a half line spacing. Again, disfluency was created for the other three texts by decreasing the font size of one text by 20%, increasing the line length of another text by 20%, and decreasing line spacing by twenty% for the concluding text. The reliability of the tool, equally examined in a pilot study with 50fifth graders, was high (Cronbach'south α = .797). The process was identical to the i used in Experiment 1.

Results

For each participant, we calculated an overall reading comprehension score for each text by computing the proportion of reading comprehension questions answered correctly out of four. Results are presented in Figure 2. Results yielded a significant issue of font size on reading comprehension: in dissimilarity to the effect found for second graders, fifth graders had higher comprehension scores for the smaller font-size text (.91) than the standard font-size text (.81), t(44) = -two.72, p< .01, Cohen'south d = .43. No significant effects of line length or line spacing were obtained, t(44) = .92, ns, Cohen'south d = .14 and t(44) = -.33, ns, Cohen's d = .02, respectively.

To further examine the opposite effects of font size obtained for 2d graders in Experiment 1 and 5th graders in Experiment 2, we pooled the data across the two experiments and conducted a mixed-pattern analysis of variance, with font size (small vs. standard) and grade (second vs. fifth) as within- and between-participant factors, respectively. No main effects of font size or class were obtained, both F'due south < one. Importantly, the analysis yielded a significant ii-way interaction between font-size and course, F(1, 87) = 12.74, MSE = .45, p< .001, η _p ² = .13. Thus, in fifth graders, comprehension benefited from decreasing font size, whereas in 2d graders, comprehension was impaired by this manipulation. Equivalent analyses yielded only a marginally significant interaction for line length, F(1, 84) = iii.26, MSE = .47, p = .07, η _p ² = .04, and a non-significant interaction for line spacing, F< i.

General Word

Reading comprehension inquiry has mainly focused on differences between expert and poor comprehenders, and on the cognitive and linguistic factors that predict efficient extraction of meaning from text [38]. The current study represents a novel approach to research on reading comprehension by suggesting that, (i) but manipulating the typographical aspects of text presentation can touch reading comprehension among children, and (2) children at different stages in the evolution of reading respond differently to these typographical manipulations. Specifically, the results of the electric current experiments suggest that manipulating presentation of text and making information technology disfluent has opposite effects on children at different reading stages. Amid young readers in second grade, reading comprehension became more dumb when a text was made less fluent by decreasing font size or increasing line length, whereas in 5th class, reading comprehension benefited from the increased disfluency brought on by decreased font size. Interestingly, line spacing did not accept an effect on both grades, indicating that maybe information technology is not a contextual cue that children rely on in retrieving information.

In the following sections, we address two theoretical issues. First, nosotros suggest that current theoretical and applied models of reading comprehension should be expanded to include text presentation/perceptual fluency as a factor of influence. 2d, we hash out the notion of "desirable difficulties" in learning [17,19] from a developmental perspective, emphasizing its implications for reading teaching.

The Consequence of Manipulating Text Presentation on Reading Comprehension

The opposite substantial effects of text presentation on reading comprehension for younger vs. older children accept theoretical and educational implications. Theoretically, they suggest that the interaction between the reader and the text is not only content based, nor does it solely chronicle to factors such as background noesis, proficiency in decoding, spelling etc.

In fact, text presentation changes the way data is encoded and processed. This notion has been previously suggested for reading rate and accurateness of young children. In the current research nosotros suggest that similar result exists for higher level processing (i.e., reading comprehension), and also for older children. Forth similar lines with previous studies that take shown that decreasing font size impairs reading rate and accuracy in immature children, in this study decreasing font size impaired comprehension. However, for older children, previous studies showed that decreasing font size did not bear on their reading rate and accuracy [34,37], whereas in this report it actually enhanced comprehension.

In order to understand the machinery that may underlie the different effects on younger vs. older children nosotros suggest a distinction between two bases of reading-related fluency. The get-go stems from differences in the reader component of the RAND model [xiv] and is the traditional reading fluency [41]: the rate, accuracy, and proficiency of reading. The 2d stems from differences in the text component of the RAND model is what we accept termed perceptual fluency, which is affected by be manipulations of perceptual features of text presentation.

Reader-Based Fluency Differences

The direction of causality betwixt reading fluency and comprehension is currently a matter of some debate [41]. At that place is testify that reading fluency both contributes to and is a product of comprehension [42]. These researchers thus advocated viewing comprehension and (reading) fluency as having a reciprocal causal relationship, a view currently consort by practitioners as well as reading researchers [43]. Traditionally, nonetheless, researchers take theorized that reading fluency primarily facilitates comprehension, in line with automaticity theory [5]. Thus, the more fluent a reader is, the more resources could be allocated for comprehension. The assumption behind the automaticity theory is that memory can only cope with the demands needed for reading if important components can be candy automatically [44]. Information technology is believed that the relationship between reading fluency and comprehension depends, to some caste, on reading skill [45]. It has been found that reading fluency was less strongly correlated with reading comprehension amidst poor readers with an isolated reading fluency (speed) deficit than it was among more adept readers [7]. That is for some poor wearisome readers, spending more fourth dimension may be an effective strategy. Hence better readers are typically faster and more than accurate. However, tedious readers in some instance could have adequate comprehension, while some struggling comprehenders are typically slow, and laborious [46]. Many reading interventions in fact have focused on reading acceleration as a means towards enhancing comprehension [47, 48].

Text-Based Fluency Differences

The electric current study postulates a supplementary view of the relationship between fluency and comprehension. We suggest that under sure weather condition, manipulating text-based fluency (perceptual fluency), making text more or less easy to procedure, may actually, and counterintuitively, enhances comprehension, at least for older, upper elementary school students.

Thus, in the context of the RAND model of comprehension, which includes three components, the reader, the text, and the activity, nosotros suggest that the text component should address not merely the text blazon, but also the typographical text presentation mode [fourteen].

In the current written report, older readers who had mastered the efficiency stage of reading benefited from a decrease in font size that made the impress less perceptually fluent. Presumably, the decreased perceptual fluency made the text more hard to process, at least subjectively, leading them to engage more deeply in reading the text. Similar to previous studies that examined only charge per unit and accuracy of sentence reading and not comprehension, children in second form, who had not withal reached efficiency, did non do good from the manipulation of text or the subtract in fluency [40]. This may have caused them to read slower, thus impacting their memory for what they read [49]. Withal the older children, who naturally were faster, benefited from the added difficulty of processing smaller text. Findings from the electric current study suggests that just after lower level skills accept been mastered, such that there is indeed a human relationship betwixt reading fluency and comprehension, does perceptual disfluency get an effective mean for reaching deeper processing (improved comprehension). In younger children, who are still developing the concurrent sub-skills involved in reading (decoding, speed, orthography, etc.), the increment in cognitive load created by disfluent text and the mental effort required for comprehension practise non consequence in better performance. Interestingly, the extra spacing effect that was found to aid dyslexic readers, did not aid the immature children in this study. Like to adults For case, reading speed in skilled adult readers is slowed when letter spacing is doubled [3].

Since we did not time the children, as this was a silent reading task, we do not know if this was due to the prolonged time they spent on the job, or their altered strategies in interacting with the text that inverse their reading scores. All the same, measures that tap reading time, such as rapid naming and timed word reading did not correlate with whatsoever of the reading comprehension text conditions indicating that deadening and fast readers were similarly affected by the task. Future studies should too examine reaction times for reading text in different fonts.

Developmental Perspective on Desirable Difficulties

As noted in the introduction, numerous studies in cognitive psychology take shown that manipulations that introduce difficulties during learning oftentimes enhance learning, somewhat counterintuitively [17]. All the same, it is important to emphasize that not all difficulties are desirable [50]. As noted, "Many difficulties are undesirable during instruction and forever after. Desirable difficulties, versus the array of undesirable difficulties, are desirable because they trigger encoding and retrieval processes that support learning, comprehension, and remembering. If, however, the learner does non accept the background knowledge or skills to respond to them successfully, they get undesirable difficulties." [19]. To pattern education optimally, educators should therefore be able to choose the advisable level of difficulty to support learning, rather than hinder information technology.

The current report contributes to this common view of difficulties every bit desirable to learning by raising the demand to consider developmental trends when determining the difficulty levels used during teaching. For case, French at his colleagues, found that making fonts disfluent had greater effects on students with dyslexia than on typical adolescent readers [49] In the current study, increasing perceptual disfluency by changing typographical features of the text from the standard children are accepted to, enhanced comprehension for older, skilled readers, but dumb comprehension for young, unskilled readers. Clearly, the standard text presentation format was hard enough for the younger children, such that added difficulty was detrimental to them. Thus, to promote learning, specific educational activity weather condition should be carefully examined in light of the students' skill level, and educators should go along in mind that the optimal level of difficulty to back up learning is constantly changing equally children develop their learning skills.

Future Directions and Final Comments

Our results provide an initial, unique exploration of the effect of manipulating text features and on reading comprehension, though more research is needed to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of this process. While amend comprehenders are oftentimes more fluent as readers, when looking at the text component, making the text (as opposed to the reader) less fluent may exist more than beneficial for instruction of older readers. In this study, in society to ensure ecological validity we did not command for reading time. Future studies should examine whether enhanced comprehension is due to prolonged reading in whatsoever of the atmospheric condition. Withal, reading time might not have played a role in the findings, as previous studies indicate that smaller font sizes did non affect the reading speed of older children [29]. To meliorate understand our results, future studies may also directly examine how readers monitor their comprehension and learning of text while reading, and how disfluency affects such monitoring by, for example, eliciting online judgments of learning. In add-on, information technology is important that future research examine not only the outcome of perceptual fluency on online processing of text, merely as well its event on delayed retention of the information read. Finally, it would be interesting to examine if any of the conditions has an issue of motivation.

In determination, indeed one should not judge a volume past its cover, but one should pay attention to how the text is presented within. This is especially important today, when many texts are read using electronic devices and font size can exist easily manipulated.

Author Contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: TK. Performed the experiments: SH. Analyzed the data: VH. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: VH. Wrote the manuscript: TK VH SH.

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What Font Size Is Recommended for First Grade Reading Books

Source: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0074061

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