Does Speaking Multiple Languages Affect Your GPA?

Group ID: C2
Julia Arreola, Colleen Murphy, and Albert Keller
EDT 180C- Problem Solving using Digital Technology Applications
Gary Lewallen
November 29, 2016

C2: Does Speaking Multiple Languages Affect Your GPA?

For the research project my group and I decided to ask the question, does speaking
multiple languages affect your GPA? We want to ask this question because in modern day
society, speaking multiple languages can aide to ones growth and can help with finding a job.
We began by asking general questions to be able to categorize and differentiate people and then
we started asking questions specifically regarding the amount of languages a person spoke. We
asked for gender, what year in school they are, how many credits they are taking, their primary
language, which languages they speak, and their GPA. Throughout this entire project my group
was able to use Google such that the survey was on a Google Docs Form, our analysis was on a
Google Spreadsheet, and our presentation was on Google Slides. Personally, I believe our survey
was very well produced and we were able to receive 100 responses from students.
The first chart we created represents our respondents. We were able to get eighty-one
female students, however only nineteen male students. Even though we were happy with the
amount of responses, it is always important to see who is responding. After gathering the data we
asked and wondered what would have happened if there were more males than females or if
there was an equal amount. Even though we will never know, we believe that there would have
been a shift in our data if the amount of males to females increased.

C2: Does Speaking Multiple Languages Affect Your GPA?

For this chart, we wanted to get a better understanding for our audience. We were able to
get a least one person from every class; freshman, sophomore, junior, senior, and graduate.
However, we had majority participants from the sophomore class that came out to almost half of
our students at about 44%. The next biggest class was the juniors at 34% and we only recorded
one graduate. My group and I concluded that this did not have an impact on the results, however
we would have liked to see an equal amount of respondents from each class to see if there was an
impact.

For many of our charts we decided to take the data a step further. For this chart we took
the number of languages people speak and separated out the credits. This meaning for people
who spoke one language they are taking about 14.4 credits, two languages is about 13.8 credits,
three languages is about 14.5 credits, and four languages is about 14.5 credits. In order to
calculate GPA we wanted to also see the amount of credits people are taking. We wanted to do
this because there is a difference between a person who has a 4.0 but is only taking 12 credits
compared to a person who has a 4.0 and is taking 16 credits.

C2: Does Speaking Multiple Languages Affect Your GPA?

To continue with taking our data a step further, we decided to chart out the average GPA
for each language. However something to note about this data was that we could not completely
use it because there were not an even amount of people that spoke each language. Even though
Arabic may seem to have the highest GPA, we only had two people who spoke this language. We
need an equal amount or at least close to it in order to use this data.

Going back to our survey we asked the students what their GPA was. In order to get the
previous data we had to use this chart. We received most students, around 23 landing in the 3.3 to
3.6 range.

C2: Does Speaking Multiple Languages Affect Your GPA?

Similar to the average GPA based on language, we wanted to see if there was a difference
with average GPA per year of study. We found that the seniors had the highest GPA of 3.40,
however we only had around three seniors respond. Again similar to our other data we must keep
in mind with this project that the data collected and graphed is hard to go off because of the lack
of people.

Another question asked on our survey was figuring out how many credits people are
taking this semester. We found that about 45 students are taking in between 15-16.5 credits and
we found that about four students are only taking 6 credits. I feel that even though it was hard to
truly look at our data because we did not have an equal amount of respondents, I think that it was
still essential to use the overview questions in our survey and then dive deeper.

C2: Does Speaking Multiple Languages Affect Your GPA?

Our next question we asked in our survey was what their primary language was. We felt
that this might be important in case of language barriers or it may have helped them in the long
run to not have their primary language be English. However our results showed that 86% of our
respondents had their primary language be English. After English, we had Spanish that was the
primary language for only 9% of our respondents.

Now splitting up the primary languages and charting out the amount of credits people are
taking, we created the chart below. The highest amount of credits for a language was Chinese at
16 credits then Arabic at 14.5 credits, English at 14.49 credits, Spanish at 11.89 credits, and
Mandarin at 10.5 credits. Again I feel that I have to continually state that this information may
seem intriguing, however there was only one person who has Chinese as their primary language.

C2: Does Speaking Multiple Languages Affect Your GPA?

Now this chart I personally enjoyed because we were able to analyze our data even more.
We wanted to see how many males speak a specific language versus females. Of course for
English we have everyone with 81 females and 19 males. The other data has an equal amount of
females to males or the amount of females is greater. However for Indigenous languages, there
are two males and only one female. I found this chart to be very interesting, however I would
want to know what would have happened if there were an equal amount of males to females to
begin with.

Similar to the chart with average credits for the primary languages, we wanted to take a
look at the average GPA for the primary languages. Again we found that Arabic came out with
the highest GPA of 3.79 and Chinese came out with 2.55.

C2: Does Speaking Multiple Languages Affect Your GPA?

To look at the data another way we wanted to see how many languages people speak. A
little over half of our respondents, 52% speak only one language whereas 40% speak two
languages, and 6% speak three languages. I was not surprised by these results as we live in
Arizona where I have found most people speak or know a little Spanish. We need to also keep in
mind where we are applying this survey, this being said we would hope we would have at least
two languages spoken by our respondents because of our location.

Our last chart represents the average GPA by number of languages spoken. We wanted
this chart to tell us if you speak more languages, do you therefore have a high GPA? Our results
proved this to be true, however the difference between four languages spoken and one language
spoken was 0.04. Although it shows that speaking more languages impacts your GPA for the
better, we must expand with more students to prove if this statement is true.

C2: Does Speaking Multiple Languages Affect Your GPA?

Overall, this research project was very entertaining and intriguing for me. I enjoyed my
group specifically and I feel that we worked for well with each other. We all agreed that this
project was easy to do because we were interested in the topic. Even though we ran into some
trouble with analyzing the data, we were motivated to do it. I do not believe I have any other
questions after finishing this project, however if we could do this again I would want to change
it. I feel that we ran into problems because we only had 100 responses. Although that may seem
like a lot, it truly was not because majority were females. I believe it would have been interesting
to hold a nation wide survey in order to get more diverse answers. Overall, I felt that this topic
was unique and truly interesting as society is progressing we are immersed in many different
languages.