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Adolfo Soto

Keaton Powers

February 7, 2023

English 1302

Time of day

Introduction

The time classes are taken affects grades and performance for the course. What would be

the best time to take a class? Attention spans may be different throughout the day, it could be at

its lowest during the most popular time of the day to go to school. Personal experience suggests

that taking 8:30am will not give the best performance possible.

3 experiments were conducted in Purdue University, Keele University, and Southern

Illinois University. Some of these experiments consisted of recording students’ performance in

class and exams during different periods of time. As said in (You May be Able to Teach Early

Classes, but Students May Not be Awake Yet!) “This study is to investigate the relationship

between class time and students’ performance in a course to verify whether or not students

enrolled in early morning sections have lower performance compared to those who enrolled in

sections that meet at other times of the day.(2) as it will also be the same experiment the subject

will do.

Method

The experiment will be conducted to test my hypothesis and compare the results with the

other 3 schools. A subject will be attending class throughout the week. Having 6 classes in total,

there will be 2 classes taken at 8:30am, 3 classes will be taken at noon. And 1 will be taken at

4:25pm.
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As a part of the experiment the subject will be taking track of how they are feeling

throughout each class and state how focused they are and if they learned anything. This will be

recorded after every class they take, meaning that there will be 6 results ready to be compared

with the universities’ results. The subject will also be taking track of their grades on the subject.

They will be keeping track of their exam/quiz grades, and their focus in class. To see if they're

learning anything, or if they are too tired that their performance is being affected.

Results

Results were as expected, similar to the other 3 experiments. Results from all 3

experiments were below passing grade when it came to the earliest classes of the day, 8:30

classes. One of the experiments from (You May be Able to Teach Early Classes, but Students

May Not be Awake Yet!) showed that some students ended up withdrawing from the course that

started at 7:30. but also that some students ended up withdrawing from the 3:30 classes as well.

Compared to the experiment proposed by the subject. It shows that in fact 8:30 am classes are at

a low performance compared to other times. For some unknown reason, There was in fact a

small peak from withdrawals at 9:30 am, showing that a few students from that course ended up

dropping it as well. The subject’s results from the 8:30 am class came out similar to the

experiment from the university. As the subject arrived on time to class, they still had a hard time

to focus since they were still sleepy due to waking up early. Notes were taken, and assignments

were completed, but the grades came out lower than the assignments from the course taken at

noon.
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The experiment from the article (The Relationship between Time of Day and Student

Check Ride Performance) showed the performance of their students as time went by. The graph

provided shows how the student performance started at an average level, and had a small fall

around 10 am like the other experiment. As the day went by the highest performance recorded

was from 12pm-1pm. The experiment provided by the subject showed that the classes at noon

were also the highest performance of the day. Assignments and notes were taken flawlessly, and

the subject states that it's the class he has most knowledge in. The subject states that they were

highly energized as they had already eaten, been up and walked around campus and exchanged a

few words with some friends, improving their mood and performance in class.

(Time of day, exam performance and new technology) performed another experiment

which recorded the exam grades of their students from different classes throughout the day. Its

results stated that their best time to take an exam was in the morning since it was the time of day

with the best grades. The evening class that took the exam had the worst performance coming in

last with a 54.1 grade average. The subject's 4:25pm class consisted of note taking, but was

falling asleep in class and learned very little from the professor. The first quiz they took came out

with a low grade of 60%, compared to other quizzes from different classes.

Analysis

The hypothesis was correct. School in the morning sometimes comes in handy for those

who have things to do at 6 am and are fully awake for class, but for the subject it shows that the

performance was quite low compared to the noon class. Morning classes for the subject was low

performance. It shoed that the brain is still not fully awake and the attention span is very short,
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making the subject sleepy again. The best time to take a course and have a good performance in

everything is noon, as stated in both the university's experiment and the subject’s experiment.

Being awake for around 9 hours caused the performance from the 4:25 class to be low, probably

at its lowest. With the hypothesis that taking noon classes will give you the best performance and

exam grades out of the day.

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References

Goetz, S.C., Robertson, M.F., Harrison, B.T., & Romero, M.J. (2019). The Relationship

between Time of Day and Student Check Ride Performance. Collegiate Aviation Review

International, 37(1), 129-142. Retrieved

from http://ojs.library.okstate.edu/osu/index.php/CARI/article/view/7819/7253

Hartley, james. Time of Day, Exam Performance and New Technology, Blackwell Publishing,

2007.

https://web.s.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=3&sid=385d4f35-8a04-4456-846f-

39944fadd279%40redis

Marbouti, Farshid. You May Be Able to Teach Early Classes, but Students May Not Be Awake

Yet!, 2014,

https://web.s.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=2&sid=b00e3a2e-10c0-487a-a

ed1-cabca39fb574%40redis.