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Does Eating Breakfast Affect Ones Grades in School?

IB Math Studies Project

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Table of Contents
1. Introduction/ Statement of Task

2. Information/ Measurements

3. Mathematical Processes

4. Graphical Representations

5. Interpretation of Results

6. Validity of Results
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Introduction/ Statement of Task

Does eating breakfast affect ones grades in school?
Everyday kids all around the United States of America wake up in the morning, do their daily routine and then head off to school. However, we fail to realize that some of these kids enjoy a nice beneficial breakfast before school while the other half go to school without eating any form of a breakfast at all. The question I am proposing to ask is does breakfast in fact matter for the education and knowledge capacity of kids in todays society, or is breakfast unnecessary in order to obtain good grades? In order to successfully answer this question I will perform a survey. I will survey a large quantity of kids in my school. I will make sure to ask kids of different genders, ages, social clicks and levels of education. I will orally ask them two simple questions; 1. On a daily basis, do you eat breakfast before school, or do you not eat breakfast before school? 2. On the previous report card, what was your average letter grade that you received from this school? (A, B, C, D, and F) Then on the data table that I have previously prepared I will record the answers they give me by filling out the chart. When asking the kids that I am surveying these questions, I will tell them that their name will not be written down, and encourage them to answer truthfully because their security is one of my top priorities. My main goal is to insure that my collected data is not bias and that I have surveyed a sufficient amount of people in order to accurately suggest a conclusion to the question I have proposed above. Once I have obtained my raw data I plan on performing various amounts of

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mathematical processes and equations to be able to make sense of the raw data I have collected. My focus of mathematics for this specific question will be centered upon the area of statistics (Topic 6 in IB curriculum). I will perform the chi-squared test to analyze my data and determine if these two different data points do or do not affect one or anothers outcome. Also I will be providing a visual representation of my data in the form of bar graphs. Lastly on a more basic side, I will be finding the percentages of what the kids I surveyed do compared to the others kids I surveyed. (Example: The percentage of kids that eat breakfast against ones who dont.) All of these informational pieces will help me determine the answer to my question of; does eating breakfast affect ones grades in school?

Information/ Measurment
Trial # 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Eat Breakfast 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Not Eat Breakfast A-average 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 B-average C-average D-average F-average

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Smith 14 0 0 15 0 0 16 0 0 17 0 0 18 0 0 19 0 0 20 0 0 21 0 0 22 0 0 23 0 0 24 0 0 25 0 0 26 0 0 27 0 0 28 0 0 29 0 0 30 0 0 31 0 0 32 0 0 33 0 0 34 0 0 35 0 0 36 0 0 37 0 0 38 0 0 39 0 0 40 0 0 41 0 0 42 0 0 43 0 0 44 0 0 45 0 0 46 0 0 47 0 0 48 0 0 49 0 0 50 0 0 *0 means that the person said this to be their answer. For every row there is two 0s (answers) because I was asking two questions. One row equals one persons answers for both questions. *

After organizing all of my raw data into a easily readable table I came to the realization that not one single person that I surveyed had an average grade of an F. So when doing my calculations and mathematical processes I will not include the F column because there is no information to

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be analyzed. This will keep my data more compact and together rather than having it spread out amongst a wide area. There is no point in analyzing it if there is no one that it applied to; however it is interesting to see that in todays society not many people receive an average grade of an F anymore.

Mathematical Processes
Percentages
Eats Breakfast/ Total number of people surveyed= Percentage of people that eat breakfast: 23/50= .46 46% of the people surveyed eat breakfast

Does not eat breakfast/ Total number of people surveyed= Percentage of people that dont eat breakfast 27/50= .54 54% of the people surveyed do not eat breakfast

Total number of people who have an average of an A/ Total number of people surveyed= Percentage of people that has an average of an A 20/ 50= .4 40% of the people asked have an average of an A

Total number of people who have an average of a B/ Total number of people surveyed= Percentage of people that has an average of a B

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16/50= .32 32% of the people asked have an average of a B

Total number of people who have an average of a C/ Total number of people surveyed= Percentage of people that has an average of a C 10/50= .2 20% of the people asked have an average grade of a C

Total number of people who have an average of a D/ Total number of people surveyed= Percentage of people that has an average of a D 4/50= .08 8% of the people asked have an average grade of a D

Chi-Squared Test
( )

Where fo are the observed frequencies and fe are the expected frequencies.

Frequency Chart:

Average Grade Eats Breakfast Does Not Eat Breakfast Total

A 14 6 20

B 4 12 16

C 4 6 10

D 1 3 4

Total 23 27 50 (grand total)

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7 Step Process
1. Ho: Average school grade is independent of eating breakfast. HA: Average school grade is dependent of eating breakfast. 2. df=(rows-1)(columns-1) df=(2-1)(4-1) df=3 *df also can be represented by v which is the number of degrees of freedom*

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3.

Significance level

4. Rejection Inequality: Critical Value= 7.815

5. 6. Reject the Ho. The average school grade is dependent of eating breakfast. Based on this data eating breakfast does affect ones grades. 7. P=.0396 This supports my conclusion that eating breakfast and grades are dependent of each other because it is a low value which backs up my conclusion of dependence.

Graphical Representations

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Interpretation of Results
I was somewhat surprised with the results that I obtained from my data! From my calculations I came to the conclusion that eating breakfast does in fact affect ones grades in a positive way. My graphs are a good representation of how the majority of the kids I surveyed obtained a higher average grade if they ate breakfast daily. After doing some outside research I was able to justify my own personal small scale experiment with some other researchers work, who have attempted to answer this question. My conclusions also showed that these two invents are dependent on each other which once again surprised me. Personally I did not think eating breakfast was that important for academic purposes. Also in my calculations I noticed that the
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amount of kids who did eat breakfast and the amount of kids who didnt eat breakfast was close to half and half but there were a few more kids who didnt eat breakfast. Also a conclusion that was presented to me very early in this process is that not one single person was an average F student. This impressed me, and made me realize how much our society is progressing and becoming smarter. Most of the kids were above a C average which is very good. This investigation helps to support everyone out there that says breakfast is the most vital meal of the day and also has encouraged me to start eating breakfast. This math is telling me that the importance of a breakfast before kids head off to school can truly make a difference in their grades. After researching breakfast investigations performed by other people I found a lot of information about why it is that breakfast helps increase your grades. Some of the reasons they had was because it increases your attention span and ability to retain information. The chi-squared test is what I used to interpret my raw data in order to suggest most of my conclusions.

Validity of Results
There were many limitations in my investigation. First off, I was only able to survey people who went to Urbana High School. Ideally i would want to survey many people from various schools in order to make my data less bias and more accurate for all of America. Secondly I would like to increase the amount of kids I surveyed by a lot! I was only able to survey 50 people however I made sure that I surveyed people of all different kinds in order to not be bias. Also I made sure

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that I obtained data from both genders. However I only surveyed high school students. In order to truly get an overall correct result I would need to survey kids between 5-18 years of age. In my calculations one thing that I could have done was take out my decimal points further but other than that I was exact. I could perform more calculations in the area of probability in order to gain more factual information from my investigation. One way I could improve my investigation is survey more people of different ages. I also should have analyzed my data in more ways so I could see more views of it. Overall, I would say for the circumstances I was in I did a good job on attempting to keep my investigation as bias free as possible.

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