Colourful Confusion (The Stroop Effect) Amber Huang and Lhoda Kim Burnaby South Secondary Floor Location: J13P

Our science fair project was on the Stroop effect. The Stroop effect is caused when you write a colour word but with a different coloured ink of the colour word. For example, the colour word "Blue" printed in the colour ink "Red". We wanted to find out which of the two different age groups (Gr. K-2 and gr. 5-7) would be better at withstanding the Stroop effect. Our hypothesis was that the younger aged students would be more confident in identifying the colour of the words but vice-versa for the older students because of their different reading abilities. For this experiment, we visited an elementary school (South Slope) and got permission to borrow 100 students. (50 students from each age group) We pulled out a student one by and conducted 2 experiments/tests on them. First, we got the student to read out the colour words on a poster, then we got them to next identify the colour the words. The older students had 20 stroop colour words with 30 seconds to read them over, but the younger students had 12 words with 30 seconds. Our final data results were able to support our hypothesis. The students in grades K-2 were stronger in identifying the colour of the words, whereas the students in grades 5-7 were stronger in reading out the words because the majority of the older students were better readers than the majority of the younger students. If we were to do our project again we would also consider the variables of different genders and/or brain sides and how they'd affect our final data results. Through this project, we had a lot of fun and learned a lot about how age affected the ability of students with colours.