How Does Your Diet Affect Your Academics?

Group 1- Sana Abdulla, Lauren Reese, Seth Matsueda, Courtney Williams

Arizona State University

EDT 180 C: Tech Literacy: Problem Solving using Digital Technology Applications

Professor Lewallen

Research Project

April 26, 2018

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How does your diet affect your academics?

How Does Your Diet Affect Your Academics?

The purpose of this document is to provide an analysis of the overall question “How

Does Your Diet Affect Your Academics?” This document will discuss why the people within

this group chose this question, what data we collected and what questions we asked overall. This

document will also discuss the data that we conducted and will include a descriptive paragraph

about each. This allowed for the analysis of the overall question and what conclusions were

gained overall.

Introduction

There have been many discussions about the deciding factors of a student’s academic

performance. Factors such as sleeping or how often a student studies seem to be traits that

students frequently take into perspective when going about their academic career. However, what

if how well one performs in their studies is also affected by their diet? Recently we have been

able to look into this exact question during the final research project during the course of EDT

180. In order to study this question appropriately, we had to ensure that we receive the correct

data in order to do so. We came up with a list of questions to include in a survey that other

students could partake in. These questions included: what year the student is currently in, how

their dietary habits are on a scale of 1 to 5, how many meals are typically consumed in one day,

how many times a week fast food is consumed, how much water is consumed in one day, their

current GPA, their concentration level in class on a scale of 1 to 5, if the student multitasks at all

during their classes, and their study habits when going about assignments. This was a lot of

information to process into data, but it was very important we ask these questions in order to

ultimately find the correlation between the two. In order to process the survey to students, the

app Google Forms was used. With the help of Professor Lewallen, we were able to receive

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How does your diet affect your academics?

responses from 133 different students, all with different dietary habits. By performing this

survey, we were able to further our research on how diet affects one’s academics with the new

data that was provided to us.

Discussion

By analyzing the amount of times students eat fast food per week, we can see that students who

eat fast food only once per week maintain higher GPAs than students who eat fast food two or

more times per week. Students with GPAs greater than or equal to 3.51 tended to eat out only

once per week. However, a similar number of students who ate out only once per week also had

GPAs of 2.00. Thus, we did not find a strong correlation between eating fast food and

maintaining a high GPA. In general, given the quality of the vast majority of fast food

restaurants, this graph does somewhat contribute to our claim that the quality of students’ diets

does contribute towards their GPAs.

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How does your diet affect your academics?

This graph compares the amount of water drank during the day to how well students believe they

can concentrate in class. As we can see, students who drank less than two cups per day maintain

lower rates of concentration than those who drink two or more cups of water per day. Students

that drank 5-8 cups of water a day tend to maintain the highest levels of concentration than

students who drank less. This graph also contributes to our claim that diet has an effect on

students’ grades. While this graph focuses on concentration in class as opposed to GPA, it shows

that students tend to be less focused in class if they are dehydrated, leading to lower GPAs.

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How does your diet affect your academics?

This graph shows that students who maintain a regular diet of 2-3 meals per day maintain the

highest levels of concentration. Students who consume a number of meals that are at the

extremes on the spectrum (1 or 5) maintain the lowest rates, while students who eat two to three

meals a day tend to concentrate better. Students who eat two meals a day maintain the highest

rates of concentration of all students surveyed. This graph supports our research because it shows

that a lack or excess of daily meals leads to a lower concentration in class, which in turn leads to

lower GPAs.

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How does your diet affect your academics?

In this graph, students rate the quality of their diet on a scale of one to five - one being the worst

quality and five being the best quality. As the graph shows, students who rated their diet as

average (3) or above average (4) maintain higher GPAs than students who rated their diets as

terrible, below average, or of the highest quality. Students with GPAs of 3.51 or better are more

present in the 3 and 4 range than the others. Students with a GPA between 3.01 and 3.50 are

present in the 3 range and appear in very small numbers across the rest of the range. There is a

strong correlation between how students describe their diets and their GPAs. To summarize,

students with GPAs above 2.00 rated their diets higher compared to the other students.

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How does your diet affect your academics?

Analysis

When we take into account the results of all four of these graphs, it is apparent that diet

does have an effect on the academic performance of students. The quality and quantity of meals

per day along with the amount of water consumed per day comes together to improve

concentration, cognitive functions, and wellness in general. When students fail to maintain a

healthy diet, it shows in their grades. It is noted that while there are a few exceptions to this idea,

the majority of students perform based on their dietary habits. Since this research was done

within such a limited time period, a change that we would make includes expanding this research

for a longer period of time. We would follow these same students to see if they have changed

their dietary habits, and if they did, how their academics were affected as well. There are various

factors that one can take into mind when discussing ways to improve their academic performance

overall. However, the dietary habits that a student partakes in, can have a lasting effect on not

only their lifestyle but on their cognitive function in academics overall.