Abstract:

Children live in a world surrounded with visual information. Visually presented content material enhances the target information desired for students to learn. Color eases the processing of information by creating information targets and simplifying complex textual information into visual segments. The writing process can be difficult, so understanding the components can enhance a student’s actual academic potential. Using color-coding to see particular subdivisions of writing can enhance a student’s comprehension of how writing unites words into sentences and ideas into coherent topics that narrate, describe, persuade, or explain. The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of a color-coding writing strategy on the writing performance of adolescents with mild-moderate disabilities. The project goal was to show that the use of color enhances students’ understanding of the writing and skill development by making written expression patterns more clear, logical, and manageable by simplifying the writing process. Adding color-coding to a proven writing strategy will demonstrate that using an inquiry-based teaching methodology that incorporates an inductive style of learning improves writing performance of students with mild-moderate learning disabilities. To evaluate the actual impact of the color-coding enhancement two comparison groups were used. Color-coding schemes through color choice and combination in relation to function enhances and adds interest to the written text, playing a significant role in the effectiveness of communicating written information. Undifferentiated text presents no interactive elements to aid interpretations of the written content, potentially hindering not only the remembrance but also the recall of information. Highlighting of information, with color, creates visual landmarks helping to follow and understand the structure of given information. Information that is complemented with color is a revealing visual structure of information levels and types, adding an interactive element and signaling the structure and organization of the text. Color enhances the informational levels by defining the sequential content structure, and color augments the informational types by differentiating categories of information. Accordingly, a well-designed color scheme incorporates meaningful visual signals to make useful distinctions when mentally following the structure of the information. Diversity is addressed by presenting a non-linguistic and non-didactic manner to present content material to students from various cultural backgrounds, performance levels and learning styles. Visual information structures communicate complex information by chunking, queuing, and filtering undifferentiated black-and-white text. Color creates a perceptual layer of differentiated and consolidated visual information because adding color signals critical types of information. Overall, the participants in this study showed improvements in their writing. Significant growth was evident in the pre-test post-test data for student participants in the experimental groups. In addition, the intervention effects were observed beyond the special education English course in written works for other classes. This study attests to the importance of student interaction with writing components to improve writing skill mastery in understanding, manipulation, retention, and retrieval of content material knowledge.

Keywords:

Color-coding, writing, disability, visual, differentiation.