Using colours for grading schoolwork

Once upon a time, when I was a teacher, I had a good collection of red pens. Real red pens, also red pencils (they were half blue and half red, pretty cool), and red markers. Every teacher used red to make corrections. I disliked that because I’ve always been more of an individualist; I like to do things differently as much as I can.

At some point, I started to use green instead of red. Then, I used purple for a while, and my favourite: pink. I was having fun with the different colours, especially when my students started to ask me why I was using other colours. I was doing something different and they were curious about it, which was a good thing. I always encouraged curiosity.

We all enjoyed the different colours. I started to rotate the colours to make it more interesting. It started to be a topic of conversation. One day, I decided to use their interest to know which colour I was going to use next to create some motivation.

I assigned different colours to different grades. They had to try to get as much of their work right to get their papers marked in the top colour.

And just like that, I saw a new level of engagement with the subject, with their work. There was a new playful element that now played a positive role. Believe it or not, they started to improve. Both learning and teaching have to be fun.

As a teacher, you spend a good amount of time with your students, you are part of their life, and you should contribute to a little more than just teaching a subject.

Something as simple as using different colours became something that transformed my teaching and my relationship with my students. Colour-coding can be used in different ways and breaks the monotony of just one colour. Colour also can enhance how students absorb information.

Colour-coding information before presenting it to the students can have a significant impact on how they remember it, mainly because certain shades enhance learning and recall by improving our brain’s ability to process and store information, making it easier to recall later.

On this topic of the use of colour in teaching and learning, the study The Influence of Colour in Memory Performance: A Review by Mariam Adawiah Dzulkifli and Muhammad Faiz Mustafar for the National Library of Medicine found that warm types of colours such as yellow, red, and orange have been found to have a greater effect on attention compared to the cool type of colours like brown and grey.

As a result, many teachers have implemented colour coding as a tool to help their students learn and retain information more effectively.

Indeed, there is a relationship between colours, attention, and memory performance. Studies have revealed that specific interventions involving colours can be introduced in order to deal with memory-related problems such as learning difficulty, autism, dyslexia, and others.

As you can see, the positive results I obtained with my students after introducing a variety of colours to replace the solitary and overused red ink were, years later, backed up by science.