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Color is very important to humans in how we process information. It is the first thing we see and recognize and is imprinted on the brain, helping us to recognize and recall facts later on. In this episode, we'll be chatting with Brigid Danziger of Math Giraffe to discuss color and its use and impacts in the classroom.
Brigid is the creator of DoodleNotes and is an expert on dual coding and visual and linguistic connections and how they lead to better retention, recall, and long term memory.
Join us for a fabulous episode jam-packed with insights and knowledge surrounding the power of color. And if you love it, screenshot it, tag us @teachingtoolboxpodcast and @mathgiraffe, and let your friends know about the hottest new podcast in town.
Links Mentioned in the Podcast:
Classroom Organization with Colors Blog Post
Eric Jensen's "Brain Based Learning"
How Color Affects Student Learning Blog Post
Dual Coding theory & Visual Note Taking Blog Post
Related Episodes
Ep 9: A Guide to Study Skills - Strategies, Techniques and Insights into Teaching Study Skills
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Amazon links are affiliate links from Brittany Naujok and The Colorado Classroom, LLC®. I earn a small amount from your clicks on these links.
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Transcript:
The Use of Color in the Classroom
[00:00:00] Narrator: You're listening to The Teaching Toolbox with Brittany and Ellie. Join them as they talk all things middle school.
[00:00:20] Ellie: Hey there! I'm Ellie and I'm here with Brittany.
[00:00:24] Brittany: Hello!
[00:00:25] Ellie: And today we're going to step into the colorful world of education on The Teaching Toolbox, the podcast tailor made for middle school teachers. In this episode, we're unlocking the secrets of teaching with color, using color to bring lessons to life, Organization with color that can make your classroom look like a work of art, and a whole spectrum of strategies to inspire and empower our young learners.
[00:00:49] Ellie: Today, we have the pleasure of welcoming our guest, Brigid of MathGiraffe, to help us tune into color. Welcome, Brigid.
[00:00:57] Brigid - Math Giraffe: Thank you.
[00:00:58] Ellie: Do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself before we get into all things color?
[00:01:03] Brigid - Math Giraffe: Sure.
[00:01:04] Brigid - Math Giraffe: At Math Giraffe, I focus on blending creativity into the classroom, and especially in math class.
[00:01:10] Brigid - Math Giraffe: So we can get both hemispheres of the brain involved, and kind of activate that stronger learning by getting kids to get a little more creative.
[00:01:18] Brittany: Cool. Well, when I think of using color in the classroom, I mainly used it for organization. I used it in an elementary experience, mainly for myself. In benefiting myself so that I could organize my materials and supplies and storage areas to make everything flow better for myself in that respect.
[00:01:44] Brittany: And so every week I would go through the colors in rainbow order, because that made logical sense to me, rainbow order. And each week would be a different color, so I'd start out with pastel pink, and so the spelling list would be in pastel pink. And the homeworks for that week would be in pastel pink, and the behavior chart for that week would be in pastel pink.
[00:02:07] Brittany: Everything was in pastel pink for me that week, and then the next week I'd switch to, like, salmon, and then to light yellow, and so on. And when I moved to middle school, I still needed to use color. Color is very important to me in helping my brain understand things. And so, in middle school, I used it more for the students benefit, where I separated...
[00:02:35] Brittany: My class periods into colors and so I had like first period was red third period was yellow And so on. And then everything in that class period was done in that color. So when I wrote on the agenda board, it was in red or it was in yellow or it was in green. When I had their portfolios up front, they were in red, yellow, green, blue, purple.
[00:03:02] Brittany: Their reward buckets were in red, yellow, green, blue, purple. And so that's how I've mainly used color in my experience teaching. But I know it can be used in a lot of other ways. I do have a blog post about using color in the classroom for organization. I will link that in the show notes. But I know you can also use it for like differentiation.
[00:03:29] Brittany: There's, you know, wars all the time on the internet about what color is math or what color is science, you know. And people like get all offended and stuff, you know. I always considered math to be red. What about you guys?
[00:03:47] Brigid - Math Giraffe: But I love the idea of sorting by class period. That's so smart.
[00:03:53] Ellie: Yeah, I was not nearly as colorful as you and in my organization within my classroom, but I did use different color folders for different classes that at one point in time I used to have, I used to make them keep everything in the classroom at a point in time where they were always losing things.
[00:04:08] Ellie: And so when we did that, I had those, stair files, and I would keep all of their folders in there. So like first period might be red and second period might be green and third period blue. And then they would know exactly where those folders were in the classroom. And if I happen to move them, they could just identify which color they were looking for, which color was their class.
[00:04:32] Ellie: And they could easily find those. So I did the thing, you know, that with, with their class periods. But then. If students had trouble organizing themselves personally, as far as getting their homework done, keeping their notebooks organized, things like that, that was often something that we would suggest to them, that they use the same color notebook and folder and everything for a particular subject.
[00:04:58] Ellie: So maybe they kept a red folder with a red notebook for math and a green folder with a green notebook for science and a blue notebook with a blue folder for social studies, whatever the case may be. And then even in their assignment books, if they took and either wrote their assignments in that matching color or put a square around the block for that subject in that color, it just kind of keep them A little bit more organized using using the colors to help them in that way.
[00:05:28] Brigid - Math Giraffe: That's so smart. I like along with the like teacher prep end of things, using color and like you're both talking about before we Students use color, which I'm also very passionate about. With the teacher prep parts, it's good even to print in color, which, of course, we always have copy restrictions, but anytime you can, the kids can be seeing color.
[00:05:50] Brigid - Math Giraffe: Or even, if not, if you can't do that, at least colored paper. Like, go ahead and take advantage. They usually have all those, you know, brights or whatever, because even just seeing the color on their page, will help the kids make memory connections. Like, Oh, I remember that when it was on the orange paper.
[00:06:07] Brigid - Math Giraffe: Like it's one of the most powerful signals to our brain. So we can use color in all these little ways when we're even prepping or setting up our classroom to help boost learning and memory. There was a study done, University of British Columbia in this published in Science Magazine to kind of observe how the cognitive performance of the participants would vary depending on whether they saw red or blue.
[00:06:31] Brigid - Math Giraffe: During just performing tasks and the red groups did better on press for recall and attention to detail So like remembering words or checking your spelling and punctuation and the blue groups did better on tasks that were requiring invention or imagination So they were better at coming up with creative uses for a brick or you know, creating toys from collections of shapes so you can even just Print on those different colored papers depending on your goal, like a red color can be used when you want to improve memory or when they're completing a task like proofreading because it helps focus in on those details and red is great for recalling attention to detail.
[00:07:06] Brigid - Math Giraffe: So maybe if you're setting up those little dividers when you're taking a test on the table, you know, the privacy nook, whatever, like maybe make it red because that can help them remember everything and be more attentive to the detail. And then on the other hand, if you're doing, you know, STEM challenges or something, then you might want blue because that's better when they're brainstorming in a group or when you want them to think creatively or think out of the box, because seeing the blue will activate the inventive and imagination side of things.
[00:07:35] Ellie: Oh, that's a great idea.
[00:07:37] Brittany: That's so cool.
[00:07:39] Ellie: Interesting. Yeah.
[00:07:41] Brigid - Math Giraffe: Very interesting. Yeah. So even when we're like, you know, with using red pens or blue pens, you know, like we can make those. smaller choices with just kind of an awareness of that.
[00:07:52] Ellie: Yeah. It was just, that made me think that, I know they say not to use red pens because red pens are scary and it makes, you know, it can be intimidating, but that makes me think that in some cases, if we do want them to remember something specific, like the spelling mistake that they made in a word and the correct spelling, maybe seeing that in red would be beneficial to them.
[00:08:12] Brigid - Math Giraffe: Right.
[00:08:14] Ellie: Interesting. So that kind of makes us then think about how else can we use color for students and in their assignments. I know a lot of us use highlighting with, and we've done that probably when we were students in school. We didn't necessarily use tons of different colors. There was the yellow highlighter, but at least adding that little bit of color in highlighting for as long as I can remember was helpful.
[00:08:38] Ellie: You know, help us to remember the information in your, your textbooks or your worksheets and things like that. But there's a lot of research. As you said, there's research out there to indicate that color really does help with memory in our study skills episode. A couple episodes back, I referenced a book that cites Eric Jensen's book called Brain Based Learning, and according to his book, we remember colors first and context next, and he Cited and stated that color visuals increase willingness to read by up to 80%.
[00:09:13] Ellie: So if we're thinking about wanting students to read certain notes, if they're, as you said, on colored paper, that might help their willingness, you know, to, to read and using color can increase motivation and participation by up to 80%. So thinking about different ways we can add color to the classroom to get them students more motivated and interested in participating and using color enhances.
[00:09:36] Ellie: Uh, learning and improves retention by more than 75%. So those are just a few
[00:09:42] Ellie: things that he talked
[00:09:42] Brigid - Math Giraffe: I am always so fascinated by all that neuroscience. That's, it's incredible to me, like just how the brain process it, like, yeah, the researchers have found that the color is the first most powerful stimulus that the brain will recognize.
[00:09:55] Brigid - Math Giraffe: Like it'll process the color before anything else. So they discovered that like the information first goes into the color center of our brains. And from there, then it move, the information is gonna move to other parts of the brain that detect, you know, the motion, the shapes, edges, transitions, anything like that.
[00:10:09] Brigid - Math Giraffe: But, um, our response to color versus. Very significant. And then we use color for pattern recognition. So I always think it's important to take advantage of that for learning and memory to, you know, anytime they can be color coding, using different colors, you know, always put a formula in a certain color in the notes or, you know, color matching, color coding, different things.
[00:10:29] Brigid - Math Giraffe: Any time that the kids can, between the color of the marker they're using, or the color of the paper, or anything at all, it's going to be a key factor. And it's really important for working memory in their brains, and then it's also the most likely aspect to be stored in long term memories. So just connecting color with any concepts we're teaching in any way we can is definitely helping boost that long term memory power.
[00:10:55] Brigid - Math Giraffe: In 2002, researchers discovered that subjects performed 5 to 10 percent better on standardized pattern recognition tests when they were administered in color, like just on the test, rather than black and white. And it also boosted their memory over time. So it's pretty amazing.
[00:11:12] Ellie: So they
[00:11:13] Ellie: did better.
[00:11:14] Brigid - Math Giraffe: Yep.
[00:11:14] Ellie: Just because it was in color instead of black and white, five to ten percent better just because it was color. Yeah. Okay. So just the fact that it was in
[00:11:22] Ellie: color.
[00:11:22] Brigid - Math Giraffe: Meaningful color. We see this in like stop signs, too. Obviously, we know stop signs are red, but that is what our brain registers and notice. We don't actually read the word STOP.
[00:11:33] Brigid - Math Giraffe: It's called picture superiority effect, where we're gonna spot the color, then the shape, and these things are like a hierarchy in our brain. So the pictures are always going to be the most powerful stimulus, whatever color they are, everything like that. And the language is secondary.
[00:11:50] Ellie: It's really interesting.
[00:11:51] Ellie: This is a completely side note here, but. Up the street from our house, there is a no outlet sign. It's a yellow diamond, and my granddaughter has seen that sign, and she is so fascinated by it, and she calls it the big yellow diamond. She did not pay attention to the letters that were on it initially, even though she knows the letters.
[00:12:13] Ellie: And we literally would go for walks just to see the big yellow diamond be and and so it's like yellow came first and then the shape that it was and eventually we were like, Oh, what letters do you see on there? But even knowing there are letters, it is the big yellow
[00:12:27] Ellie: diamond.
[00:12:28] Brigid - Math Giraffe: That's so cool. Yeah, that's awesome.
[00:12:32] Brigid - Math Giraffe: Yeah, that's how kids That's how our students are...
Transcripts
Transcript:
The Use of Color in the Classroom
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