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The Effect of Font Size on Reading Comprehension on Second and Fifth Grade Children: Bigger Is Not Always Better

Research on reading development 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’s learning and comprehension....

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Katzir, Tami, Hershko, Shirley, Halamish, Vered
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2013
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3777945/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24069266
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0074061
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author Katzir, Tami
Hershko, Shirley
Halamish, Vered
author_facet Katzir, Tami
Hershko, Shirley
Halamish, Vered
author_sort Katzir, Tami
collection PubMed
description Research on reading development 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’s 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 second 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 fifth graders (Experiment 2), decreasing font size yielded higher comprehension scores, yet there were no effects for line length and line spacing. Results are discussed within a "desirable difficulty" approach to reading development.
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spelling pubmed-37779452013-09-25 The Effect of Font Size on Reading Comprehension on Second and Fifth Grade Children: Bigger Is Not Always Better Katzir, Tami Hershko, Shirley Halamish, Vered PLoS One Research Article Research on reading development 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’s 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 second 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 fifth graders (Experiment 2), decreasing font size yielded higher comprehension scores, yet there were no effects for line length and line spacing. Results are discussed within a "desirable difficulty" approach to reading development. Public Library of Science 2013-09-19 /pmc/articles/PMC3777945/ /pubmed/24069266 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0074061 Text en © 2013 Katzir et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Katzir, Tami
Hershko, Shirley
Halamish, Vered
The Effect of Font Size on Reading Comprehension on Second and Fifth Grade Children: Bigger Is Not Always Better
title The Effect of Font Size on Reading Comprehension on Second and Fifth Grade Children: Bigger Is Not Always Better
title_full The Effect of Font Size on Reading Comprehension on Second and Fifth Grade Children: Bigger Is Not Always Better
title_fullStr The Effect of Font Size on Reading Comprehension on Second and Fifth Grade Children: Bigger Is Not Always Better
title_full_unstemmed The Effect of Font Size on Reading Comprehension on Second and Fifth Grade Children: Bigger Is Not Always Better
title_short The Effect of Font Size on Reading Comprehension on Second and Fifth Grade Children: Bigger Is Not Always Better
title_sort effect of font size on reading comprehension on second and fifth grade children: bigger is not always better
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3777945/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24069266
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0074061
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