Do Credit Hours Affect Your Sleep?

Group B2: Collin Berry, Landon Magenheimer, Lieke Rogge

EDT 180B

Gary Lewallen

April 24, 2019

 Group B2
Do credit hours affect your sleep?

For our research project, our group decided to research if the amount of credit hours you

are taking affects your sleep. We understand that students can be losing sleep because of other

factors like work, but from the information we gathered from the responses we were able to look

at certain similarities and compare them to each other. College students have a large amount of

homework, group projects, and their classes they have to attend to receive a passing grade, we

looked at how the workload of a college student affects their sleep positively and negatively. We

asked questions that would help us come to a conclusion about credit hours and sleep. The

questions included, year of study, gender, amount of credit hours, on average how many hours

do you sleep, and a few others regarding the topic. We used a survey through Google forms

because it is a very simple way to create and share the survey. We received 90 responses which

was ideal because of how diverse the group of those who responded were.

Our results show that most students get around 6.5 hours of sleep which is below the

recommended hours of 7 to 9 hours. Not getting the recommended hours of sleep and being a full

time student can greatly affect a students performance in class and at home when trying to study

or do homework.

This first chart shows that the majority of students that receive 6 to 8 hours of sleep are

more likely to have a GPA in the range of 3.1-4.0. With this being said there are a few

exceptions, 12 of the 90 students who took the survey get 5 our less hours of sleep and still

maintain a 3.1 or higher. With those numbers you can tell that out of the 59 students who have a

3.1-4.0, 47 of them on average get 6 or more hours of sleep, that is about 80% of students in that

category.

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 Group B2
Do credit hours affect your sleep?

Looking at the diversity of this survey, you can tell that the majority of students who

responded are freshman. With that being said there are many factors which could be added to

lack or loss of sleep. First year in college can be difficult because you are trying to figure out

many things about your major, amount of classes, GPA, and many more unrelated issues. You

could argue that the data could be tainted because the majority of the responses were freshman,

they all experience completely different situations then someone who is a Junior or Senior. With

that being said we can ask a different question, does amount of credit hours affect a Freshman

more than someone who is a Junior or Senior. With more time and responses that would be a

very interesting topic to research.

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 Group B2
Do credit hours affect your sleep?
Our next two charts cover the same survey question: “Do you believe that the amount of

sleep that you get affects your GPA?”. This question simply asks the respondent to answer yes or

no. In the first chart shown, it shows how those surveyed responded based on their respective

GPA. The results show an interesting fact that those with a below average GPA (1.0-2.0) believe

that their sleep does affect their GPA, while those with an exceptionally high GPA (4.1-5.0)

believe that their sleep doesn’t affect their GPA. While the majority of the data shows that most

believe that sleep does affect their GPA, the higher the GPA, the less the respondents believe

this. This may be because those with higher GPA’s are receiving a good amount of sleep and

don’t notice an effect.

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 Group B2
Do credit hours affect your sleep?

The final chart is from the survey question: “On a scale of 1-5 (1=not at all, 5=greatly),

how much do the amount of credit hours you’re taking affect your sleep?”. This chart shows the

results based off of the respondents GPA. Based off of the results, we can see that the majority of

the respondents believe that sleep does affect their sleep, but not in any extreme way. These

results stay pretty consistent no matter the respondents GPA. The only interesting bit about this

chart is that those with an exceptionally high GPA (4.1-5.0) all chose 3, which shows that they

all believe that sleep does affect GPA but not majorly.

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 Group B2
Do credit hours affect your sleep?
To conclude, we were glad with the results that we had received and were not necessarily

surprised by anything. The results showed that not only do most students not get enough sleep,

which is 6 to 7 hours each night, but also showed a correlation to GPA. Those with average to

lower GPA’s tended to get less sleep than those with average to higher GPA’s. Students also

tend to agree with this conclusion as the majority of respondents believed that their sleep did in

fact affect their GPA. Other questions that came to our minds were: “What other factors might

affect students sleep and GPA?” and, “What are some solutions that students can do to get more

sleep?”. If we were to do this project over, we would try to drastically increase our respondent

size as that would increase the accuracy of our end results, and give us a better idea on the

answer to our initial question, “Do credit hours affect your sleep?”.