NUMBER OF HOURS WORKED vs gpa

The study of the relationship between a high school student’s work hours in a week and student’s cumulative GPA has been done before. The only difference in the studies was that they used college students as their population. Our study focuses on juniors and seniors at North Olmsted High School. Although our populations are different, our main question is the same. Olivia and I simply searched our question through Google and we used the first link on the page. There are no studies that have conducted the same study we are conducting. Only college students were the population of focus in other studies as well. We believe that there is a correlation between a high school student’s work hours in a week and a student’s cumulative GPA while the other study thought otherwise.  The researchers thought there would not be a correlation between college student work hours and their GPA’s. With their research, they were proven wrong.

The group conducted a survey to obtain their information. They asked at Youngstown State University several questions in their surveys, such as: Work schedule, number of children (if any), number of jobs, number of credits, class schedule, their age, and their GPA. We will be asking similar questions in our surveys with some differences. Some of these questions may also be extraneous factors such as number of children or the number of jobs they are working. The student’s major could be another extraneous factor. Some majors are harder than others along with the classes embedded in them. We may need to worry about this as well. Students may be taking several AP classes that may create loads of work to add to their stress. There is also response bias that may not reflect the true population. Some students may not have answered their survey truthfully to what their schedule really is. We have to worry about response and nonresponse bias in our surveys. Some students may not answer truthfully but some students may choose to not answer their survey at all. This is why sending more than double our required sample size will achieve our goal of at least thirty students. Once they collected their seventy questionnaires that were filled out, they used a Chi-squared test and a relative risk analysis. They grouped the GPA into six categories (1 - 1.5, 1.6 - 2, 2.1 - 2.5, 2.6 - 3, 3.1 - 3.5, and 3.6 - 4) and they grouped these into two other groups: Students who work more than ten hours and students who work less than ten hours. They found that the second group has a better chance of achieving a 3.0. There may the extraneous factors involved that affect the GPA but there is a difference between the two groups. I believe we will receive the same results as the other study. There will be a correlation between a high school student’s work hours in a week and a student’s cumulative GPA.  

Another similar study was conducted, but at MSU (Michigan State University). This student analyzed similar factors as the previous study, i.e. gender, age, year, college, etc. Again, this study was administrated at a college, not a high school. The student used a survey with the population being all students from MSU, however the researcher admits she sent most of her surveys to the business department. After graphing the data on several scatter plots and boxplots in hopes of finding a correlation, she found none. This contrasts to the previous study which found that there indeed was a correlation between number of hours worked and the student’s GPA. The different results suggest that the type of college is the one that attracts certain kinds of students. It also may suggest that one study was not conducted ideally and because of that, drew the incorrect conclusion. In the second study, the student predicts that there will not be a correlation because she herself has worked a lot while still maintaining a high GPA. This state of mind could bias her conclusion.