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Human Behavior Science Fair Project

Sleep Hours and School Performance

Hard
Sleep Hours and School Performance | Science Fair Projects | STEM Projects
Does the amount of sleep you get change how well you perform at school? Many people feel sluggish after a short night. This survey measures whether the numbers back that up. You survey 40 students over two weeks. Each person records nightly sleep hours along with grades and attendance. You also track sick days and activities. Then you group results into four sleep ranges from under 6 hours to over 8. The data reveals patterns between sleep and several performance measures. Students with less sleep tend to show lower grades on average.

Hypothesis

The hypothesis is that lack of sleep will have adverse effects on the performance of students.

Method & Materials

You will randomly select two groups of 20 boys and 20 girls aged 15 and have them fill out a form about their sleep patterns, health problems, school attendance, extracurricular activities, and out of school activities for two weeks. After two weeks, you will collect the forms and analyze the data.
You will need 20 male and 20 female students aged 15, consent forms, a computer to analyze your data, and permission from the school administration.

Results

The results of the analysis show that students who get less sleep tend to perform more poorly on average. This indicates that lack of sleep does have an effect on academic performance.

Why do this project?

This science project is interesting because it looks at the effects of sleep deprivation on students, which is something that many students can relate to.

Also Consider

To further the project, you could repeat it with a larger pool of students over a longer period of time to obtain better average results. You could also compare the performance of students from urban schools and schools in rural areas.

Full project details

Additional information and source material for this project are available below.

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