Typographic Cues As an Aid to Learning from Textbooks

Abstract

Writers, editors, designers, and teachers all play important roles in developing students’ abilities to comprehend, learn, and retain information. From primary grades through college, students are faced with increasing amounts of information in text books. As the information increases in quantity and complexity, the organization of the information plays a more important role in the student’s ability to find and comprehend the important concepts. This investigation proposes a method to identify important categories of information within a particular subject area and rank these categories by importance creating a hierarchy of information. From this, a hierarchy of typographic cues is developed and matched to the hierarchy. The degree of typographic emphasis indicates position in the hierarchy. Tests show that typographic cues assigned to each rank aid the learning process, providing the number of cues is less than three. Understanding these principles and their potential applications will aid publishers and designers of textbooks to more effectively organize information.