Abstract

The purpose of my project was to find out whether students who get a greater amount of sleep have a higher grade point average than those who do not get as much sleep. I wanted to study this because people it has always been claimed that sleep affects your brain and your studies and so I wanted to find out if there is an actual relationship between the two.

I started out my research by using the Google search engine to find information about sleep relationships with thinking abilities. I found that different parts of the brain become greatly affected by amounts of sleep. One website explained how a study was done to use a brain scan experiments that show parts of the brain turning on and off through out the day for people who have not had a well rested night. The same experiment was done on people who have been well rested and it did not show any flickering on and off of the brain. Many experiments have also been done that observe people and claim that the samples being used have had their grades affected by lack of sleep. One study observed two students, one who got at least 8 hours of sleep and the other who got less than 6. The student who received at least 8 hours of sleep had a much higher grade point average than the students who received less than 6 hours.

I then created a survey that I would send out to 100 randomly chosen students at North Olmsted High School. I sent the surveys out to those random 100 students however; many of the students could not be reached due to full time pseop, full time Polaris, or they are no longer enrolled in North Olmsted High School. On top of that, many of the surveys were handed back in filled out incorrectly or just blank so all together, I could only use 61 samples in the test. I ran a hypothesis test and a descriptive statistics test. In the hypothesis test, I found that my p-value was 0.352 so I failed to reject my null hypothesis that stated that there was no association between grade point average and amount of sleep. Using Minitab, I made 3 graphs to support the relationship. The fitted line plot showed a very weak relationship between the two. It helps support the alternative hypothesis.