Relationship between study hours and GPA

Introduction It has become a matter of supreme importance nowadays for students to take care of their co-curricular activities and ensure participation in as many events as they can – in order to groom into well-balanced personalities that employers are hunting everywhere. The race for academic excellence has taken a sidekick with students spending their attention on other activities as well. Thus, it becomes a matter of academic and social importance to investigate whether the neglect of the time spent on studying has any effect upon the grades and examination performance for students.

It is, as generally people believe, not necessary that students taking part in a lot of activities will not perform academically well. Neither is the opposite necessary. Quite a few variables affecting performance are related to genetics, intelligence and the abilities of individuals to manage their tasks at hand. Nevertheless, it is always necessary to spend time and devotion to studies. This paper will investigate whether the number of hours spent by students on studies has an impact on the Grade Point Averages (GPAs) achieved by them or not.

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Importance of the Problem It is an accepted fact that the amount of time spent studying is directly related to one’s academic performance in class. Most parents and teachers advocate that student spend enough time studying in order to do well on their courses and master their lessons (Rau & Durand, 2000). It is also a reality that students nowadays debate on how much time should be spent on studying for maximum learning.

Students often feel that spending too much time studying takes the fun out of school and leaves them with little time for their social life.

Likewise, they also agree that spending very little time studying would be detrimental to their studies. Unfortunately, experts do not agree on how much time students should spend studying to optimize their learning and study period. Another issue to consider is the quality of the method used by the student to study his or her lessons, some students read, some take notes or make outlines and others discuss their lessons with other students (Schuman, Walsh, Olson & Etheridge, 1985).

Each student has his or her own learning style and the way a student studies is dictated by his or her learning style. Considering that the act of studying necessitates some form of cognitive processing for efficient retention and recall, it is assumed that hours spent studying is associated with the student’s academic performance as indicated by his or her grade point average (GPA). Literature Review The lack of academic research on the effect of studying on academic performance had been reported by Stinebrickner and Stinebrickner (2007).

Accordingly, the lack of studies that test causality between the time spent studying and academic performance is due to the inability of previous researchers to include the variable in their studies and that it was considered to be biased by too many factors such as ability, memory and personal circumstances that studying it would be methodologically limited. Theory Theoretically, time spent studying has been viewed as a human capital production that students begin to expend when they start college and not before it. As such, it should be studied as an important resource that can be harnessed to increase and improve student performance.

The study by Stinebrickner and Stinebrickner (2007) had found that students who increase their study time by an hour a day translates into an increase in grade point average by as much as 1. 76 points. Thus, they concluded that studying have positive effects on a student’s overall academic performance. This is the first study that tried to establish the causality of the amount of time spent on studying to academic performance, thus it provided a useful background for the present study establishing that time spent studying directly influences academic performance. Conceptual Definition

The number of hours spent in studying practically has been found to be correlated with the grade point average for a fairly high number of students in the past. Conceptually speaking then, it should be true that students who spend more hours on studying should be masters of better GPAs. A supposition like this should be true both ways: if more studying results in a better GPA, then studying lesser should also result in a lower GPA. This will then forma comprehensive relationship enabling a researcher to form a theory and test it using hypothesis. Research Hypothesis.

Though there are other factors apart from the number of hours spent on studies per day that affect the grade point average, for the purpose of hypothesis testing, we assume these factors to be constant over our population. The independent variable of this study would be the student’s grade point average while the dependent variable is the number of hours spent studying.

The research hypothesis would be as follows: Ho: There is no relationship between the number of hours spent studying by a student to his/her grade point average. Ha: There is a relationship between the number of hours spent studying by a student to his/her grade point average.