Doctors Megan Barker and Lisa McDonnell, working with the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative (CWSEI) found that removing complex vocabulary from texts greatly increased students’ conceptual understanding. Their research involved splitting an undergraduate biology class into two groups – one group read a typical pre-reading before class, and the other group read a simplified version of the text. The video below highlights some details of Barker and McDonnell’s experiment, and what they found.