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Friday, May 21, 2010

Red pens make you see more errors?

MinnPost: This is an example of an interesting hypothesis and good reporting.
"But, as a study [PDF] published online in the European Journal of Social Psychology earlier this month reports, “people using red pens to correct essays marked more errors and awarded lower grades than people using blue pens.”"
Fascinating, but the article also includes the study limitations.

The current study has limitations, of course. The study did not control for the volunteers’ age, level of education or other possibly confounding factors. And none of the volunteers were experienced teachers.

In other words, it was true for this set of volunteers, but may not have a significant impact on people who grade for a living.

2 comments:

Joe said...

Alternate Heading: "Correlative relationship demonstrated between red pens and power-tripping."

rick said...

I agree. It would be interesting to run this study for teachers and to also assess personality type for the same group of teachers.