What affects a person’s ability to read quickly? Does the color of ink affect how many words a person can read? Scientists have been studying this for many years. In the article, “Does Color Incongruency Affect Responses to Words” the author writes about a man named John Ridley Stroop. In 1935, he performed an experiment to test the effect of color of words on reading (Cooper). In his experiment he had a list of words in black ink and another list in colored ink. He timed people reading both lists to see if they could read one list faster than the other. He found that there was little difference in the reading time (“Background On”). The hypothesis for this experiment is, “If the ink is the color red, then the amount of words read …show more content…
On the day of the experiment, three 16 year old boys met in the Lincoln High School Computer Lab. The boys names were written on a piece of paper along with the color of ink being read. One boy read the passage with the red ink, one read the passage with the blue ink, and one read the passage with the black ink. The boys were timed with the stopwatch for 30 seconds while they read the passage. After 30 seconds, the words read were counted and recorded on the piece of paper. The boys repeated the above steps until each boy had completed the three passages in each color of …show more content…
Boy #2 read 169 words in red ink, 179 words in black ink and 192 words in blue ink. Boy #3 read 156 words in red ink, 162 words in black ink and 161 words in blue ink.
After looking at the results of the experiment,, it showed that the passage with the most words read was printed in black ink which was not predicted. The results show that the passage printed in red ink had the least amount of words read. If this experiment were done again, the reading level of each boy should be found before the experiment. This would make for a more accurate experiment. This was an experimental error that could have been prevented if more research would have been done before the