Creating An Experimental Design

How does stress affect a college student’s productivity? Does it inhibit the student with emotional turmoil, or does it motivate the student and send them into work mode? Personally, as a college student who experiences great amounts of stress, anxiety reduces my productivity. It gives me a sense of doom in my chest and makes me replace the hours of efficient studying with worry. This question interests me because if the effects of stress can be proven and identified, then we can work on a solution or remedy to the issue. If a college student is put under a high degree of stress, then the student’s work will be reduced in quality and quantity. Under stress, the student will spend more time panicking then performing the task. The more time wasted on the task, the more the student has to rush to finish. The rushing will result in a lower quality of performance and work.

To test my hypothesis, I will randomly select 6 students each, from 10 colleges across the United States. The different students will be selected randomly by a raffle. In total there will be 60 participants. Randomly, the 60-selected college students will again in a raffle be divided into three different groups of experimentation. Each group will be given the same test, the control, but each group will be given conditions varying in “stressfulness,” the independent variable. The performance quality and quantity on the given test, the dependent variable, will conclude the affects stress has on college students work productivity and quality. I will operationalize quality by the amount of correct answers, and I will operationalize quantity by the number of questions answered. There will be three levels of the independent variable, high stress, medium stress, and th...

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... The participants will have to have taken the SAT two years prior to the experiment, in order to insure that the subjects all have the same memory of the test.

If the results of my study prove my hypothesis (college students put under a high degree of stress reduces the student’s work in quality and quantity) correct, then the more stress a student is under causes them to produce poorer work. Increased stress makes the student waste time worrying over how little time they have which wastes even more of their time causing them to rush through their work at expense of the quality of their work. These findings would benefit greatly in further studies of how to help students reduce their stress. The identification of the hindering of work performance of our future leaders, once exploited, should be concerning and identifying the issue is the first step in solving it.