D OES PLAYING SPORTS AFFECT SCHOOL MARKS ? Arun Jha and Sagar Badve Year 10 Perth Modern School

Introduction: In Australia, we are fortunate to have our wonderful lifestyle, with a good balance of sports, school and relaxation. However, as students head to high school it seems that a much greater emphasis is placed on studies, and therefore they reduce the time spent in other areas, such as sport. But is this really necessary? Rationale: Our school is academically selective, and there is quite an emphasis on studies. However, there is also an emphasis on having a balanced lifestyle. Hence, we decided to investigate whether spending time on sport actually has an impact on marks. I NTRODUCTION AND R ATIONALE

O BJECTIVES AND H YPOTHESIS Objectives: To identify whether the amount of time students spend playing sport has an effect on their marks, and if so, the magnitude and direction of effect. Research Questions: Does the amount of time students spend playing sport affect their marks? If so, is this effect positive or negative? How strong is this effect? What is a reasonable limit in the amount of time spent on sport? Hypothesis: Logically, the more time students spend playing sport, the less time they have to study. Hence, it was hypothesised that as the number of hours spent on sport increased, the students’ marks would decrease.

T HE S URVEY We wrote a survey with 9 questions asking how many hours the students played sport now and in the past, and what marks the students generally received, in Mathematics, Science, English and Social Sciences. The responses to the questions relating to the hours spent on sport were recorded in seven categories, ranging from less than one hour to 10+ hours, and the responses to the questions relating to marks were recorded in eight categories, from less than 50 percent to 95+ percent.

D ATA C OLLECTION AND A NALYSIS We administered the survey via Google Docs and advertised it on our school’s year 10 Facebook group. A total of 73 people correctly completed the survey. We were then able to analyse our results. To allow processing via our statistical package, the categories of results were assigned numbers (0-6 for hours of sport and 0-7 for marks).

T ABLE OF A NALYSIS Using the statistical package GraphPad Prism 6, a Spearman rank correlation test for non-parametric data was performed for all pairs of variables. The Spearman’s r values (in green) and p values (in red) are shown below: Values have been rounded to four decimal places. Significant results (p < 0.05) and their r values have been given in bold italics.

S CATTER PLOT OF R ESULTS Key: Current hours of sport per week < 1 0 ≥ 1, < 2 1 ≥ 2, < 3 2 ≥ 3, < 5 3 ≥ 5, < 7 4 ≥ 7, < 10 5 ≥ 10 6 Marks (%) <500 ≥ 50, < 601 ≥ 60, < 70 2 ≥ 70, < 80 3 ≥ 80, < 85 4 ≥ 85, < 90 5 ≥ 90, < 95 6 ≥ 95 7

R ESULTS No statistically significant correlations were found between sporting involvement and marks. However, we found strong positive correlations between: Past sport and present sport involvement Mathematics and Science Overall marks and all individual subject marks A moderate positive correlation between English and Social Sciences was also found.

D ISCUSSION Interpretation: Our data suggests that there is no relationship between the amount of sport played by students, past or present, and their school marks. There are two possible main lines of interpretation. Students may simply have enough time to both study successfully and play the levels of sport that they do. Or, the students who do not play much sport do not spend all of their extra time studying, and instead undertake other non-academic activities, resulting in a similar amount of study time to students who play a lot of sport. It is in our opinion that the latter is more likely, as surely most students do not want to spend all of their free time studying. Further testing is required to confirm this. In either case, our results suggest limiting sporting time will not boost marks.

D ISCUSSION Interpretation (continued): While unrelated to our hypothesis, we found some interesting correlations between subject marks. The correlations found between Maths and Science marks and English and Social Science marks appear to support the notion that students are either better at sciences or humanities. However, as average marks was also positively correlated with all individual subject marks, this suggests that students that score highly on average do so across all subjects.

D ISCUSSION Limitations and Future Directions: We only analysed a fairly small sample size of year 10s in one school, and did not collect data on their gender. Hence, it would be interesting to conduct a similar investigation in different year groups, different schools and using a larger sample size, considering each gender individually. In particular, as our school is academically selective, it is possible that our students require less study time to perform well academically, reducing the impact of time spent playing sports, or other effects. To obtain more precise results, data could be collected as hours per week for sport and subject average (%) for marks. It would also be interesting to measure studying hours directly to see whether the amount of sport played has an effect on this.

C ONCLUSION Conclusion: Our results do not support our hypothesis. There were no statistically significant correlations between the time students spent playing sport and their marks. However, other interesting correlations between subject marks were found in our data. Further research could expand our understanding of these findings.