Summary -from Alison

Summary of “The Impact of Color on Learning.”

In the electronic article, “The Impact of Color on Learning” (2003), from Illinois Design Association in “Perkins & Will”, the author, Kathie Engelbrecht, conducted the studies from colour psychologists, medical and design professionals about colour’s importance in school facility.

According to the article, K. Engelbrecht(2003) basically pointed out that our body has a fundamental analysis and response to certain colours. The author (2003) then indicated the benefits by utilizing colours in school (Engelbrecht). As she mentioned, the benefits are: measuring human alertness, altering moods, cogitative clarity and energy level, relieving eye strain, increasing productivity and accuracy, creating a system of order, “helping to distinguish important and unimportant elements in the environment, and supporting student’s developmental processes” (Engelbrecht, 2003). The writer (2003) further provided the guidelines for using functional colours in academic environments, such as warm and bright colours are employed in preschool and elementary school, cool colours are utilized in upper grade and secondary school, and pale or light green are painted n libraries (Engelbrecht). She briefly introduced the meaning of functional colour which means the colours are utilized for certain purpose more than to focus on the colour’s aesthetic of beauty (Engelbrecht, 2003).

In conclusion, Kathie Engelbrecht (2003) indicated the advantages of using colour in academic environment to support colour’s significance in learning environment, provided brief guidelines as example about how to use colours in school, and introduced concisely the functional colours.

Critique/ Opinion

Although this article was not entertaining, it was attractive to read because its content and structure are valuable to learn.

The article was not bias due to the fact that the author conducted different experts’ opinions to support the importance of colours in academic environments. The writer also supplied concise guidelines as example to use colours. Not only has she provided specific examples about how to use colours and indicated the certain colour towards the certain benefit, the statistic from other expert’s experiment, and citation from famous experts, but also she logically and clearly divided the article into several sections such as “abstract”, “introduction”, “understanding our biological processing”, “introducing colour in schools”, “guidelines for academic environments”, and “summary”. The clear structure of the article enhances the quality of reader’s comprehension.

In addition, in the content of the article, it would be an incomprehensible theory if the author did not provide numerous demonstrations and explanations to alter the structure of the article. However, the author successfully attracted reader’s attention in the abstract by the words “…studies conducted by colour psychologists, medical and design professionals …” to powerfully convince the reader’s identification and to provide the fist superior impression to readers that this article was not a bias.

To sum up, although this article was not entertaining and was not provided any counterarguments, because of the author’s apparent arrangement in the article structure and the high-quality strategies to employ the examples and citations from other experts, she contributes a comprehensible and valuable article to readers. Moreover, because the writer conducted other experts’ researches into one article, it is especially worthy to learn from the author how to cite, utilize, omit and conduct appropriately the abundant points of views about the impact and importance of colour in academic environment. Consequently, both structure and content are worthy to learn.