What makes it bad is that their methods invalidate their findings: they used Courier New font to measure students’ reading speeds with eye trackers. It also does not account for generational differences given that some people grew up with double spaces and some have known nothing other than the single space (ie, the right way).īut those limitations don’t make it a bad study, just a limited one. Only about a third of people in the US have a 4-year degree-a statistic that does not include Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Branson, Steve Jobs and Michael Dell, Walt Disney and other folks you’ve probably heard of-and this study cannot conclude anything about what influences their reading. And, as with many behavioral studies, findings from college students are not generalizable to the general population. First, 60 participants is way too small to draw any broad conclusions. The participants were 60 native-English-speaking college students with normal or corrected vision.
Consider this a case study for the sorts of things to look for when you're assessing the validity of a new medical study's findings.
Before I dig in, why am I blasting this typography study in a health column? The flaws in this study are the same kinds of flaws seen in thousands of medical studies.
