D6

Sleep and Academic Performance

Group: D6

Madilyn Holman

Hannah Axtell

John Ramos

EDT 180-D

Professor Lewallen

March 28

1
 D6

For the research project our group decided to find information on how sleep ultimately

affects students academic performance positively and negatively. The questions that we asked in

our survey are; what year are you in college, which college are you enrolled in at ASU, how

many hours of sleep do you average per night, how many hours per week do you spend on

homework/studying on average, how many credit hours are you currently taking this semester,

do you tend to fall asleep during class and what is your GPA? We originally had a couple more

questions but decided to eliminate them to be able to focus more on the data in depth. To collect

our data we created a survey through Google Docs Form and it was shared to students at Arizona

State University. One-hundred and fifty-five students participated in our survey as well giving us

a large range of data.

One of the first questions asked in our survey was what year in college each one of our

participants were. We found that there were ninety-two Freshmen who took this survey. There

were thirty-four Sophomore’s who took this survey. There are eight-teen Junior’s who took this

survey and only nine Senior’s who took this survey. There are two Graduate’s who took this

survey. In all we had a total of one hundred and fifty-five respondents. We then focused on what

college each of our participants were in. We thought this would be interesting to see what major

all of our participants are to see which types of course they may be enrolled in. With the data

gathered we found that most of the participants are enrolled in Mary Lou Fulton Teachers

College and The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Below is the both of the graphs that we

formed from this data.

2
 D6

3
 D6

An important question we asked within our survey is; “How many hours of sleep do you

average per night?”. This was an important question to be asked to find the main point of the

data we were trying to find. The amount of sleep a student gets per night we believed would

directly correlate with their GPA’s. The data we found with this question is that the average

amount of sleep for these students is seven hours per night, with the maximum being ten and

minimum of one.

The next question included within our survey was; “How many hours on average do you

spend per week on homework/studying on average?”. We choose to ask this question to see how

much work these students are actually putting into their GPA and to see if sleep is not the only

dependent variable to a high GPA. We found that individuals that spend more than fifthteen

hours per week on homework/studying on average have a 3.27 GPA. Individuals that spend more

than ten hours per week on homework/studying on average have a 3.30 GPA. Individuals that

4
 D6

spend ten hours per week on homework/studying on average have a 3.25 GPA. Individuals that

spend less than ten hours on homework/studying on average have a 3.19 GPA.

Next we asked how many credit our the participants are enrolled in this semester. We

asked this just to see if the data we collected had a difference in GPA with students with more

credit hours. The average credit hours per semester from our participants is 15.43 credit hours.

The minimum credit hours per semester is 1 credit hour, which cannot be true. The maximum

credit hours per semester is 21 credit hours.

5
 D6

The last two questions asked where; “Do you tend to fall asleep in class?” and “What is

your GPA?” Do you tend to fall asleep in class what a question asked to see if the students that

fall asleep in class have differing GPA’s than the students that do not fall asleep in class. And

what is your gpa, is a question that was needed to be asked to correctly analyze all of the data

received. Below is two graphs of data from the information found from each question.

6
 D6

When comparing how much sleep an individual gets per night versus their GPA we found

that students that get the most amount of sleep per night on average (seven-eight hours of sleep)

have the highest GPA on average. Individuals that get less than four hours of sleep for night have

the lowest GPAs. It is noticeable from the data that we were able to collect that the more sleep

that you get per night ultimately leads to a higher GPA, and lower hours of sleep conclude to

students

having a

lower GPA.

7
 D6

When comparing the average amount of sleep per night with the average GPA by the

participants different years in college we found that Freshman had the highest amount of sleep

per night on average but the 2nd lowest GPA. Juniors had the lowest amount of sleep on average

per night and they had the 3rd highest GPA. We did notice that the Seniors with the obviously

noticeable highest GPA had only .9 less hours of sleep per night compared to the highest amount

of sleep per night with Freshman. Ultimately we do not see a correlation for the amount of sleep

per night with the GPA.

Overall with the information that we gained through our survey it has shown that overall

many Freshman took this survey. The overall correlations we found within our data was very

8
 D6

interesting and left us all realizing how important sleep really is for good academic performance.

The data showed that participants that get more than eight hours of sleep per night have the

highest GPAs. But when we looked at the data for each of the different grade levels of

participants the data was not as steady. The data showed that Freshman who tend to get the most

sleep per night have one of the lower GPAs. Seniors were shown to have the highest GPAs with

a very small sleep decrease for each night compared to the Freshman. This does seem to make

sense though because the Senior’s GPAs are calculated from all of their semesters at ASU

whereas Freshman (at the time they took the survey) have only had one full semester so far.

When looking at GPAs when asking students if they tend to fall asleep in class it showed that

those who do not fall asleep in class have the highest GPAs. This research project was extremely

interesting and helpful to master the use of Excel better and google forms as well, all while

finding great data.