The Impact of Nutrition on Academic Performance

Group D: Nikki Soares, Marley Caliendo, John Kim

EDT 180D

Professor Gary Lewallen

April 11th, 2018

Group D: The Impact of Nutrition on Academic Performance

I. Introduction

A healthy nutrition can affect how individuals perform in school. There are many

different aspects to nutrition such as: meals consumed, types of food, and processed sugar

consumed throughout the day. Furthermore, caffeine can immensely affect how individuals

perform in the classroom. With caffeine consumed individuals might fall prey to a “sugar crash”

or be overly active throughout the class. This can affect how students are able to study and pay

attention to the professor, which can affect their grade point average (G.P.A). With this basic

understanding of how nutrition and caffeine can affect individuals performing well in school the

purpose of this research was to see how nutrition affects academic performance (G.P.A.). The

researchers collected this data using Google Docs Form where the researchers received 134

responses. The researchers used the data to created different charts comparing different consume

of foods to the participant’s GPA.

II. Research Parameters (i.e. Discussion)

The researchers created three different charts using the data collected from the

participants.The first graph compared the GPA of the student’s year of study to the average

number of meals eaten per day. There were 133 participants that responded ranging from

freshman to graduate students. The meals of each grade level were similar from freshman to

sophomore and continuously increased as student’s developed as a student. Although as meals

increase from freshman to senior the GPA stayed the same. Interestingly when it came to

graduate students eating less meals than seniors and juniors their GPA increased.

For graph two, the researchers compared the GPA of students by year of study to their

caffeine consumption. There were 133 participants ranging from freshman to graduate student

enrolled in EDT 180. When comparing the two there was a increase of caffeine consume with

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Group D: The Impact of Nutrition on Academic Performance

juniors and a decrease in GPA, but the opposite with graduate students and their GPA. In

addition, freshman and seniors the caffeine consume were similar but seniors had a lower GPA.

The last graph compared the GPA of students by the year of study to the items of sugar

eaten. The graph showed that graduate students ate the most sugar and had the highest GPA.

Freshman (1.86) and juniors (1.82) ate a similar amount of refined sugar items, and the GPA of

these two grade levels were similar. For sophomores they ate an average of 2.38 items of sugar

per day and their GPA was around the as seniors. Although seniors ate an average of 3.17 their

GPA was similar to sophomores.

III. Analysis

When looking at the data and chart the conclusion that the researchers can come up with

is there are no significant difference that nutrition has on student’s GPA. The other questions that

we would ask is their age? How does age correlate to GPA and nutrition? Does commuting

change student’s GPA and food consumption? If we had to do this research over again the way

that I would change is by comparing age to nutrition and GPA. Does how old we are affect or

nutrition and GPA?