Performance on exams: study overnight or have a good night sleep?

§  What area of interest/research question do you wish to explore through a research study design? Who performs better on exams: students who study overnight or students who have a good night sleep before an exam?

§  What variables or concepts are you looking to observe and/or manipulate? Two groups of students of equal abilities and intelligence studying for the same exam. One group of students will sleep the night before the exam; the other group will study overnight.

§  What type of design would best suit your research question? (Experimental, Correlational, etc) Experimental

§  What research method would you use to conduct your experiment? (Survey, case study, naturalistic observation, lab experiment, etc.) Survey

§  If applicable, what would you put as your independent and dependent variables? independent variable: studying/sleeping the night before the exam; dependent variable: grades for the exam

§  Give a hypothesis about what you think you might find. Students who sleep the night before an exam get better grades than students who study overnight.

§  What might be the benefits and implications of this study? In other words, who would gain from it? If the hypothesis is proven to be true than it will encourage students not to study overnight. 

§  Please reflect on the process of designing this experiment. What were the challenges you faced? Was this more/less difficult than you expected? How? One of the challenges would be to keep the level of students’ readiness for the exam at the same level. Even if the students rested the night before the exam they might be not as prepared as students who studied overnight.