Does Sleep and Internet Use Affect Your School Performance?

Group D2
Brandon Crouse, Jade Jacobs, Shirley Perez Ochoa

Section EDT 180D

Professor Gary Lewallen

23 April 2019
 When approaching a topic for our research paper, we decided to question and look into

whether or not the amount of sleep and computer use has an effect on your performance in class.

We created a questionnaire and disbursed it to other students that were taking the same course.

We received 90 responses so we could get a broad number and various facts that could be

analyzed. For this, we used “Google Forms” to create the questionnaire and it generated a

composite list in a separate Google spreadsheet for which we could look over the data. Below is

a list of the questions we included in our questionnaire:

1. What academic year are you?

2. What college are you enrolled in at ASU?

3. Around how many credit hours are you taking?

4. What do you primarily use the internet for?

5. Does your internet usage interfere with how many hours you sleep?

6. On average, how much sleep do you get during a weeknight?

7. On average, how much sleep do you get during a weekend night?

 The above graph is one of our most important findings from the questionnaire. One of our

questions was directly asking if their Internet use affected their sleep and school performance. 57

out of 90 students, or 63.333% said, concretely, that it did. We believe that this is definitive

proof, but we wanted further factors that might come into play when looking at their

performance.
 When we asked about their primary use of the Internet, it was equal. There were more

students that used the Internet primarily for school or work but overall, it was even. We feel that

school/professional use may have more of an effect on their sleep patterns due to multiple

assignments, lengthy projects, etc. That could possibly be answered by more specific questions

and further research.

 When analyzing the data, we did see trends emerge. There were some that were more

important in our opinion than others, but all were equally valuable. One trend that we noticed

was that students were able to get more sleep on the weekends than during the week. We

speculated that this was due to the weekly assignments that students receive that kept them busy

into the late hours and cause them to get less sleep. In contrast, the weekends were more free to

them because they completed things that were due and didn’t have to use their computers. We

believe that this is why the results were as they were.

Once we reviewed the answers that our classmates submitted to the questionnaire, we
were able to see that the more classes they were taking, the more they used the internet and in

turn, the less amount of sleep they would get on an average basis during the week. Those

students did, however, get more sleep on the weekends and we attribute that to most of their

work being done during the week. We did realize after the questionnaire was complete, we

should have asked additional questions to get more specific answers that were directly linked to

sleep deprivation and its link to schoolwork. If we could redo the assignment, we would have

added these questions because without them, we were only able to get very vague estimates

about what we were trying to evaluate.

Even though there were things that we would change within the questionnaire, we feel

that the overall results were accurate. We believe that computer usage and sleep patterns are

directly linked to school performance. The more time they spent on their computer and the

Internet, the less time they were able to spend getting rest, which would affect their school

performance.