Should we make reading ugly?

In my last piece looking into accessibility of fonts in class, I ran into this study from 2013 by M. M. J. French et al., Changing Fonts in Education: How the Benefits Vary with Ability and Dyslexia that gave me a chuckle:

...harder-to-read, or disfluent, fonts hold promise for promoting recall and retention of written information...

It almost defies logic that a font that is inherently more difficult to read would help with greater understanding of the text, but the authors' reasoning is sound:

This could provide support for the hypothesis that it is the greater cognitive processing, which is required for reading a disfluent font, that gives the retention improvement.

It is fascinating that their conclusion applied to students with and without dyslexia, and by a significant margin. Could this explain the phenomena I found where Redditors are claiming to read more fluently simply because of a font change?

To me, the authors' research is just pure fun to read. They cleverly open another window for further research to uncover more of this curiosity to promote further accessibility to literacy in education. With more resource creation tools at our disposal than ever, and more teachers coming to the profession as digital natives, we have to power to seamlessly utilize technology to foster greater learning.

To reinforce the crux of my previous rant on fonts: Each change in isolation may not have a wide-reaching effect, but in aggregate can become bigger than the sum of it's parts.

From here on out, you'll see me using Papyrus) on all future columns. Maybe I'll try out Webdings for my midterm study guide.