Does chewing gum have an impact on student performance? : An analysis of quiz grades

Abstract: In this paper, we will discuss the results of an experiment measuring

whether chewing gum during a quiz impacts student quiz grades. We found that there was no significant difference between the average scores of students who

chewed gum during the quiz versus those who didn’t chew gum.

Logan Kramer

Dual Credit Statistics with Mr. Crow

Period 0B

5/20/16

2016-2017 Final Project

           

Table  of  Contents    

Table  of  Contents  .............................................................................  2  Analysis  ...............................................................................................  3  Introduction  ...........................................................................................................................................................  3  Body  ...........................................................................................................................................................................  3  Conclusion  ...............................................................................................................................................................  5  Graphics  ...............................................................................................  6  Works  Cited  .......................................................................................  8  Appendices  .........................................................................................  8  Appendix  A:  R  Code  and  Output  Used  for  Analysis  ...............................................................................  8  Appendix  B:  Website  Link  ................................................................................................................................  9  Appendix  C:  Bellringer  Quiz  ............................................................................................................................  9  Appendix  D:  Raw  Collected  Data  ................................................................................................................  12  

 

 

 

 

                   

Analysis  

Introduction      

Students sit at school for 7-8 hours a day, often detached from their surroundings as they

struggle to pay attention. The act of chewing gum has been proven to stimulate brain activity,

and Dr. Serge Onyper found in recent studies that chewing gum before a cognitive test will

improve performance for the first few minutes of testing. Additionally other studies have found

that chewing gum impacts students later in an activity that requires concentration. One study

found that chewing gum lowered reaction time and increased correct answers on a concentration

assessment which required the use of short-term memory (Morgan, et al.). Thus, I was interested

in discovering whether chewing gum, and the increased brain activity which comes with it, could

help students better perform on a quiz. Though other studies focused on concentration tests and

relied on the chewing of gum occurring before any assessment began, I hoped to research the

short-term effects chewing gum could have on student performance. My hypothesis was that

student grades would be dependent on whether or not a student chewed gum. If this hypothesis

proved to be true, it could have important implications for students because those who easily lose

focus or have trouble on assessments could perform better by simply chewing mint gum.

Body  In order to conduct this experiment, I worked with the five pre-AP biology classes taught

by Ms. Hutson at LASA High School. These classes had a total of 126 students, who I tested

over the course of two days while they all took identical bellringer quizzes. (The quiz can be

found attached as Appendix B.) The students were given the option to opt out of the study at any

point. After eliminating absent students and those who opted out, there were 111 total

participants in the survey. I assigned each student a unique “student number” to ensure that their

quiz grade would not be associated with their name in the data, then randomly selected half the

students in each class period to receive gum to chew while the rest did not chew gum or any

other substance during the quiz. The 57 students who chewed gum were given one piece of

peppermint Orbit gum to chew throughout their bellringer quiz. All students were asked to chew

nothing else during the quiz, except if they were assigned to chew this gum. For each student, I

received a slip of paper including their student number, whether or not they chewed gum (or

chose to opt out), and their grade out of 10 on the bellringer quiz.

The population I focused on for this study was LASA students, since this was an

accessible population and one in which each subject has to take assessments at school on a

regular basis. I best estimated a random sample of students by using a sampling frame all of Ms.

Hutson’s pre-AP biology students. My actual sample included all of Ms. Hutson’s pre-AP

biology students who were present in class May 6 or 9 and did not choose to opt out. I wanted to

obtain a sample in which no one student would have any particular content advantage over

another, so for this it was necessary to use students all taking the same course from the same

teacher. However, some self-selection bias may have occurred if students with lower scores felt

more pressured to opt out so their grade would not be shared. All steps to avoid this bias were

taken into account by anonymising the sharing of grades. My sample of 111 students is slightly

above the 10% threshold which is supposed to limit how much of a population can be sampled,

but I believed my method to be the most thorough while still being the most random.

An independent t-test was determined to be the most appropriate analysis for the data

because quiz score is a quantitative variable and I would like to compare the distributions of quiz

score for two groups: gum-chewing and control. In order to test the normality assumption

necessary to perform an independent t-test, we can determine that although both the distributions

of gum-chewing and non-gum-chewing grades are certainly not normal, both have n>30, so the

normality assumption is met. We assume a random sample given that my population is all

students, and one teacher’s five classes at LASA should give a somewhat accurate representation

of the population as a whole. The samples are independent of one another because each student

either chewed gum or did not, so there is no overlap. Additionally, each test subject was

independent of one another because one student’s grade had no effect on any other students’

grades. With all of these assumptions met, an independent t-test could be performed.

Our null hypothesis was that students’ quiz grades were independent of whether or not

they chewed gum, while our alternative hypothesis was that students’ quiz grades were

dependent on whether or not they chewed gum. Our test found a p-value of 0.559. Given that a

95% confidence interval was used because this is the standard confidence interval, we failed to

reject the null hypothesis and could not find a significant difference in quiz scores between

students who chewed gum and those who didn’t. The mean grade (out of 10) for students who

chewed gum was an 8.26 while the mean grade for students who did not chew gum was an 8.

Conclusion  

In this test, we failed to reject our null hypothesis and did not find significant evidence to

suggest that chewing gum affected student performance on a quiz, proving my hypothesis wrong.

Our p-value of 0.559 is far above 0.05, the value we should have generated at or lower in order

to reject the null hypothesis. My original research into this question found that brain activity was

increased and performance improved when a subject chewed gum, but Onyper’s experiment set-

up also involved the person chewing gum for five full minutes before beginning the cognitive

test. If I were to conduct the survey again, I might try creating three groups: one as a control that

does not chew gum, one that begins chewing gum as they begin to take the quiz, and one as a

group which gets the gum five minutes before they begin the quiz to see if there is any

significant difference between these groups. I would also consider doing this experiment with a

test graded on a 100 point scale, because a quiz on a 10 point scale with no grades in between

whole numbers gave less range in scores. However, the experiment set-up generally worked very

well and it was interesting to note that there is not enough evidence to prove a relationship

between chewing gum and grade on a quiz.

Graphics   Figure A: The right-skewed distribution of grades of students who chewed gum during their quiz  

 

Figure B: The right-skewed distribution of grades of students who did not chew gum during their quiz

Figure C: Scatterplots of the grades for control group and gum-chewing students

Works  Cited  Morgan, Kate, Andrew J. Johnson, and Christopher Miles. "Chewing Gum Helps You

Concentrate for Longer." The British Psychological Society, 3 Aug. 2013. Web. 19 May 2016. <http://www.bps.org.uk/news/chewing-gum-helps-you-concentrate-longer>.

Onyper, Serge V., Timothy L. Carr, John S. Farrar, and Brittney R. Floyd. "Cognitive

Advantages of Chewing Gum. Now You See Them, Now You Don’t." Appetite 57.2 (2011): 321-28. PubMed.gov. Web. 6 May 2016.

Appendices  

Appendix  A:  R  Code  and  Output  Used  for  Analysis      > ###Final Project Code### > > #Eliminate rows where grade equals NA > project <- proj[-c(14, 15, 21, 33, 60, 70, 71, 72, 77, 84, 86, 88, 90, 112, 118),] > > #Make vectors for gum chewing and non-gum chewing groups' grades > gum_grade <- project$Grade[project$Gum == 1] > nogum_grade <- project$Grade[project$Gum == 0] > > # Check the normality assumption > hist(gum_grade,xlab = 'Grade (out of 10)', main = 'Gum Chewing Grades') > hist(nogum_grade,xlab = 'Grade (out of 10)', main = 'Non-Gum Chewing Grades') > > # Run independent t-test

> t.test(gum_grade,nogum_grade) Welch Two Sample t-test data: gum_grade and nogum_grade t = 0.5855, df = 104.064, p-value = 0.5594 alternative hypothesis: true difference in means is not equal to 0 95 percent confidence interval: -0.628054 1.154370 sample estimates: mean of x mean of y 8.263158 8.000000

Appendix  B:  Website  Link   http://www.gumstatsproject.weebly.com This website features my report as well as additional information about my analysis.

Appendix  C:  Bellringer  Quiz   This is the 10-question quiz administered for the survey.  

 

 

   

       

 

Appendix  D:  Raw  Collected  Data  43 0 1044 1 1045 1 846 0 847 0 948 1 849 1 750 1 1051 1 852 1 1053 1 954 1 555 0 1056 0 1057 1 858 0 759 0 660 0 161 0 962 0 1063 0 1064 0 1065 1 1066 0 567 1 268 1 1069 1 970 0 171 1 172 1 173 1 1074 0 1075 0 1076 0 977 0 178 0 1079 1 1080 1 581 1 1082 1 1083 0 884 1 185 0 10

StuNumber Gum Grade Opt.out Absent1 1 102 0 63 0 104 0 95 1 56 0 57 0 58 1 69 0 1010 1 1011 0 5 112 0 413 1 714 1 115 0 116 0 1017 0 718 0 1019 0 1020 1 721 1 122 1 223 0 224 1 825 1 1026 0 827 1 1028 1 329 1 1030 1 631 0 432 1 633 0 134 0 835 0 936 1 737 1 1038 0 839 0 040 1 641 1 1042 1 10

     

86 0 187 1 988 1 189 1 1090 0 191 0 792 1 1093 1 894 1 1095 0 1096 0 1097 0 1098 0 1099 0 8

100 0 8101 1 7102 1 8103 1 9104 1 10105 1 10106 0 10107 1 5108 1 10109 0 9110 1 9111 1 10112 0 1113 0 10114 0 9115 0 8116 1 9117 1 10118 1 1119 0 4120 1 10121 0 7122 1 8123 0 10124 1 7125 0 10126 0 1