A most interesting topic. It is definitely something that should be looked at because presentation of information on any medium matters when it is aimed at children and teenagers. Especially teenagers when they are developing there own sense of aesthetics, which in most cases would be pop. Children are easier to cater for because anything cute and eye catching are sufficient typographic criteria.

In my opinion teenagers of today are bored with sans serif fonts because of its generic use in news papers, text books and other publications. If there briefs or course descriptions were written in a serif, it would engage there attention because of its modern feel.

And if these information systems are designed in an engaging way, students who do not listen to their teachers would be more inclined to read it themselves.

It would be very intriguing to do a survey to a group of high school kids of which type fonts they find interesting or engaging.

Good Luck
QueenSammy

As a fellow new teacher, I've found that high school students are skeptical of overly designed stuff as it looks to be pulled from some pre-constructed curriculum. Authenticity is big with teenagers, and I like to use my design to signal to them that everything they are reading is either from a non-endemic source (something not designed for classrooms) or made by me.

Hi Samantha, what a well deserving topic for research! I hope more teachers follow suit and start to more intentionally design their briefs to be more engaging to their students. I have a few clarifying questions and a couple of suggestions. One, what is your main objective with your research? Assuming that your project is perhaps not as stringent as a formal research experiment with independent and dependent variables, you would still likely benefit from some focus. For example, if you limit your measurement to the students' levels of engagement, you can define what that means. You would also likely do well to define the qualities of poorly designed briefs as well as contrast those with good qualities of your brief.

That then brings us to your question of what typefaces to choose. Pivoting a little from what Daniel mentioned above, you'd do well to survey some high school students and ask them what sites they visit for their news or other important time-sensitive information and get them to tell you how "trusted" and "engaging" those sources are. If you already have a group of students that you are using for your test of briefs you could use the same group to survey ahead of time. The smaller the sample size the less general the results can be applied, but they'll likely be very applicable to that group, and would show merit for further research. From there, you can get a feel for what typefaces they are likely to pay attention to. You may or may not want to include other typographic variables such as alignment, spacing, and hierarchy as each of these influence the overall design but also require measurement if they are to be different between the good and bad brief samples. Otherwise, focusing exclusively on typefaces may be a more manageable project.

Wish you the best of luck!

When I was out of school and enthusiastic about writing a thesis and getting my degree I read a lot about legibility. At first I thought legibility was all about a great typeface and superb typesetting. What I learned is that as with any perceptual process reading is a guessing game and the more interest, context and familiarity with the topic, the easiest reading will be as long as the typeface or typesetting is not too bad.

Apart from recommending good screen fonts I would emphasize the importance of highlighting a lot of smaller but relevant information chunks (quotes, numeralia, short facts) that raise interest and give context before starting the reading. A couple of other good legibility practices (if you are not presenting long prose) are presenting the text in many smaller sections with descriptive titles and

For screen legibility Open Sans or Merryweather are great choices. You can see many typeface pairings here:

http://fontpair.co/

Don't be shy with typeface size on screen, most fonts will read well above 17 point size.