Amount of sleep vs. Grades

One area of interest that I would like to explore is whether the amount of sleep a person gets affects their grade on a psychology test. The variable that I am looking to observe in this study is amount of sleep. The independent variable in this experiment would be the amount of sleep, and the dependent variable would be the grade on the test. A correlational design would best suit this study because I want to observe whether amount of sleep is correlated with grades on a psychology test. The research method I would use to conduct my experiment is a survey. In the survey, I would ask each student in the class the average time they sleep each night and then I would ask them their average grade on the four psychology tests taken during the semester. My hypothesis would be that the students who sleep longer than ten hours on average will have lower average grades on their psychology tests, the students that sleep fewer than six hours on average will have lower average grades on their psychology tests, and the students who sleep between six and ten hours will have the highest average grades on their psychology tests. This is because the students who sleep very long on average will have less time to study and the students who sleep very little on average will be too tired to focus on tests. Therefore, I hypothesize that there will be a strong “n-shaped” correlation between amount of average sleep and grades. The benefits of this study are it will provide evidence as to how sleep affects grades. All the students would benefit from this study because the study could provide them with more effective and efficient ways to study. Heath psychologists would also benefit from this study because they would see how sleep affects grades. This experiment has many flaws. First, there are many confounding variables that affect grades on tests, such as time spent studying and natural intelligence. Also, it would be very challenging to collect the data from all 500 students and ensure that the students responded honestly. Overall, however, this study would be very easy to carry out and creating a graph for the data would be painless. Designing this experiment was very easy. I did not face many challenges and it was less difficult than I expected because the idea for the experiment instantaneously came into my head.