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The affect of negative media content on highschool students mental health at school X.

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Gap

Existing literature suggests that a high frequency of cellphone use results in negative academic outcomes. Researchers have focused on generalized studies students and looked at television and video gaming screentime. This research intends to uncover the correlation between cellphone usage and AP students. (Khan, et al., 2022) found that across 38 countries, children who keep 4 hours or more screen time proved lower academic performance. Though, they did not consider social media screen time and its effects on AP (Advanced placement) high school students specifically. The reason filling this gap is important is because of how integral cellphones have become teenagers’ daily lives. Looking at how students use them throughout the day can show how they affect concentration, study habits, and goals set by the students themselves leading to their overall academic performance. Looking into the correlation could provide insight into how students’ cellphones might be the reason for their performance in an advanced academic setting and how they should be managed either by the student, teacher, parent, or policymakers.

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Cellphones continue to rise in popularity, especially in the last decade. This spike in cellphones leads to major changes in how students function when assigned schoolwork and how they intake information. Due to the growth in media relevance, researchers now look at ways screen time affects overall comprehension of school lessons, academic outcomes, and student performances. Existing literature shows a negative correlation between screen time and academic performance. (Zapata-Lamana et al., 2021) found that students started to notice declining problem-solving skills and lesson memorization as their screen time went up. Understanding the correlation between having access to cellphones at school and how it affects their academic performance is crucial to cellphone management in classroom settings to allow the student to perform to their highest capability and receive the best academic outcomes.

Earlier studies have determined the effects of television and video games on an adolescent’s academic performance but lack research facing cellphones in the academic setting. It’s been established in this area of study that over four hours of mixed-media intake is considered an addiction. At 4 hours of media intake is when you can start seeing a negative correlation in screen time and academic performance. Adolescents who reported having 4 or more hours of screen time reported having higher school stress and dissatisfaction (Khan et al., 2022). Most of the literature on this topic uses surveys and interviews to conduct their research by asking students questions related to their GPA, class participation, and average daily screen time.

This research will specifically explore cellphone use in academic settings for the purpose of how cellphones should eventually be limited or managed. The study will specifically research cellphones on AP (Advanced Placement) students in high school to get a look at how cellphones should be limited in these specific classes. This paper categorizes academic performance as how well the student maintains GPA. This study will include an examination of AP high school students by conducting a survey enlisting questions relating to their end-of-semester and end-of-year GPA, as well as average test scores in AP classes. In doing so, this paper hopes to find the correlation of cellphone screen time and academic performance specifically in higher education classroom settings. The study will be conducted in a suburban high school in the academic year 2024-2025 with students in years 9-12. This research will not look at other factors that may affect academic performance like sleeping disorders, extracurricular activities, and socioeconomic background and status

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3.7 Crafting an Outline for the Literature Review

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In my paper, I will likely use a google form because of how easy it is to manage, create, and share. My questions will be close-ended because of my specific topic needing specific answers.

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Initially, when I discovered a gap in my research, I just went with looking for article to help lead me to ways to fill the ways that cellphone screentime is affecting AP students academic performance, but then I realized that the topic can go deeper if I explored the difference in how cellphone screentime affects both AP students and generalized studies students and how it affects their academic performance seperately. I settled on looking deeper n my project while I was working on revising my gap and realized I was mising something to make the research go further and deeper into the subject.

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When looking into the academic coversation surrounding screen time affecting student's academic performance, most researchers use surveys and interviews to gather their data because of how helpful those tools are to gather data from large groups of people. Although I don't require as big a group as most researchers in this topic have, I figured that the survey would help me gather data quickly, efficiently, and organized. I decided not to use interviews as a methd, even though other reearchers in the topic commonly used survey and interviews comined for their most accurate results because it won't be as structured for my goal and question. Settling with a survey, I believe it will be most efficient in helping to answer my research question because after reviewing other researchers method, I saw how the surveys made for quick replys, accurate results, and very little bias. Choosing to use a survey as a method will make it easy to formulate questions specifically geared towards answering my research question and discovering the correlation with cellphone screentime habit of both AP students and Generalized Studies students and how it affects their academic performance. Seeing the success of other researcher's papers achieving answering their research question by using a survey is what pushed me to using a survey in my own study. Some studies I looked at even created their own correlation of of survey results, which the ultimate goal of my paper is to discover the relationship of my two variables, which is another reason for choosing this method. After reviewing all the methods my sources used, a survey was the obvious choice because off how a survey is set up to directly ask questions about demographic like grade and specific class and their screentime habits.

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Originally I developed my research question based on the initial gap I discovered within my topic. Once I was writing my gap paragraph to cover how I am going to fill such gap, I realized it was missing something to give a bigger understanding the academic conversation. I decided to play around with the gap and look into the topic more and decided that instead of just comparing the affects of screentime of advanced placement student's academic performance, I switched to comparing advanced placement students cellphone screentime and the affects on their habits and how that affects their academic performance. Now the topic has something that would add beneficial research into the academic conversation. When I decided to make this switch, I had to go back and rewrite my gap and my literature review to then align with my new research. Throughout the whole process I was going back and changing details to make the paper have overall better alignment. Once I got to trying to implement my research method, I realized that getting enough of th seperate demographics to respond would be harder than I though, so I had to go to certain classes to advertise the survey to gather participants. The decision to find specifc classes to advertise the survey allowed me to now gather enough responses for the research and come to a conclusion on the relationship of cellphone screentime habits of AP students and generalized studies' students and how it affects their academic performance.

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My initial curiosity came from my own experience of Sophmore year in high school. I found myself struggling to manage free time on my cellphone and work time on school assignments. It led m to wonder if there what the correlation between the two are and how cellphones impact a students academic performance. That was my initial curiosity that eventually developed into the curiosity of the affects of cellphone creentime on two different demograhics of students: Advanced Placement and General Studies/ On-level placed students. My study doesn't explore many outside factors that could affect academic performance. I am also curious about how different mental health struggles also impact academic performance. If I were to conduct a follow-up study I would look at how ADHD, depression, anxiety, etc all correlate with academic performance. My research process has prepared me to look at those factors by showing ways to conduct a proper correlation and asks question that will give answers that will answer the inquiry. Since I am already making a survey and correlation structuered survey, I can use the same structure to look at these mental health struggles and then create the research.

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This study was intended to identify the correlation between cellphone screentime and the effects on the academic performance of advanced placement students and generalized study students. Data was collected from 33 participants. 3% ninth grade, 15.2% tenth grade, 75.8% eleventh grade, and 6.1% twelfth grade. Majority of the participants were in the 11th grade. 6.1% were 18 and didn’t require parental consent form, while the rest 93.94% were under 18 and did require some form of consent. Since >4= advanced placement and <4= generalized studies in this paper, 36.4% participants are generalized studies students and 63.7% are advanced placement students.

Overall, the participants reported to have an average daily screentime of 8.25 hours (M=5.5, SD=8.10). There were screentime hours ranging from 2 to 20. GPA average was 3.8 weighted (M=4.0, SD=0.8) The GPA’s ranged from 3.5 to 4.5. Looking at the specific groups of students, between seventeen advanced placement students, an average of 7.41 AP classes were taken (SD=1.07). There was a minimum of 6.5 and a maximum of 9 AP classes. The generalized studies student’s average was 2.64 AP classes (SD=1.19). The minimum was 1.5 and the maximum was four AP classes. Based on this studies specific classification of advanced placement students and generalized studies students, there wasn’t an overlap based on numerical data present in the participants’ answers to the survey.

Throughout all the answers submitted by participants, the most commonly reported screentime time range for a week was between twenty to thirty hours and also commonly reported forty plus hours. Only a small percentage of 15.2% of students altogether reported 0-10 hours of weekly screentime. There was no large apparent difference between the two groups of students’ weekly screentime average because both groups reported very high screentime for their averages. Many of the students from both student classifications reported that they “Often find themselves picking up their phone while working on academic assignments.”  A very small portion of the students altogether report that they can remain focused on completing their assignments when their cellphone is present.

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Since my topic was a new concept to educate myself on and commit to doing a study on, there was a large amount of unertainty thoughout the process. I knew only what I had learned through experience prior to starting the research process. I knew eventually bylooking at existing literature on this topic I would eventually start to fill that gap of knowledge on the topic and have a better understanding on how to perform the research paper. I mainly just looked at other authors and how to executed their own papers and what was required in the process to make a successful paper. Meaning I read how many others with studies similar to mine utilized their resources to do their own research methods and report their results to have a better understanding on how I should do my own. While I never directly copyed anyones own style of how someone did their paper, looking at how multiple people do something gave me good ideas on where to start for my own paper. This way of educating myself really helped in how I handled the uncertainty of the research process. Other methods I used to help with the uncertainty was utilizing my peers and educators around me. I had teachers who would answer my questions throughout the process to their best extent that would guide me in the right direction. I would reach out to my peers asking how they did this or if they also encountered this to try and gather a better understanding on how to do a section of the research process.

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Many questions I asked my participants were geared towards trying to understanding the connection between their cellphone screentime and academic performance. Specifically I asked them about what is their daily screentime, weekly screentime, and their weighted GPA. By asking these questions, I am setting up the answers to help formulate a correlation between the two variables. Since my research question is trying to discover the relationship between these two variables, I find it very important to incorperate these questions in my method to help determine the results needed to answer the studies research question. Going into the study, I had hypothesized that there would be a strong negative correlation between cellphone screentime and academic performance based on my knowledge and understanding of sources I had read within the academic coversation. Then, going into the analysis of my results, I noticed that the relationship was weak and undetermined. Likely because of limitatins, but most participants answered likert-scale questions suggesting they hd bad cellphone habits and used their phones a lot during school hours. Which was expected, but most participants had GPAs over 4.0, which was the shocking part. So to conclude, my new understanding comes from the results that shocked me.

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Discussion

After examining the results, there is enough evidence to determine that the initial hypothesis was unsupported. When a student has a high average daily and weekly cellphone screen time, there is a higher chance of low academic performance. The results provide sufficient evidence to answer the research question: what is the correlation between cellphone screen time of AP students and general studies students and their academic performance? The correlation of cellphone screentime and academic performance between the two classifications of students didn’t echibit a major relationship. Though, looking at the data, generalized studies students had lower GPA’s

The results of this paper align with data presented in (Rogers 2019) highlights how teenagers are spending more than seven hours of days on their cellphones, which supports this studies results identifying that students are typically spending six to seven hours a day on cellphones. To create an overall understanding of the relationship with cellphone screen time academic performance, (Adelantado-Renau) results identify the relationship between screens and devises with screen time suggested an inverse relationship of the two variables, which contradicts the results of this study that found a weak positive relationship between cellphone screen time and academic performance

Limitations

The study overall faced many limitations that may have been impactful on the results. A major limitation that may have had a significant influence on the result is likely sample size. With only 24 results to the study, there’s a possibility that the low number of participants influenced the R-value in the Pearson Correlation to result in an inconclusive relationship. The study also may have been affected by the time-constraint. One major limitation could also be that the participants that replied to the survey were only in grade 10th and 11th grade. The very limited range of participants can have major impacts on the study's results. Other limitations could be based on the fact that some questions were based on questions that rely on self-reported data. The questions in this study are based on the assumption that all students know their GPA and screen time. Screen time is easy to access in settings, but some may have estimated their answers. Environmental limitations could be where the survey was taken by the participants, which is not accounted for. This study specifically does not look at external factors, such as sleep, mental health, and other technological screen devices like consoles, computers, VR (Virtual Reality), televisions, etc.

Implications

The findings of this study could possibly mean beneficial implications. Students could read this study and. Look at the correlation between cellphone screen time and GPA and use it to improve their time spent away from cellphones and more towards academic activities to better their overall academic performance. Teachers could take the results and make classroom rules where students must put their cellphones away to enable and teach their students better study habits and promote participation within the classroom. They could learn towards phone cubbies for all class or even just use phone cubbies as punishment for when a student shows negative and inefficient cellphone management habits when in a class. Polices could even be made school-wide enforcing students to put their phones away in a locker, pocket, or cubby during class times to promote better cellphone management and prevent excessive cellphone usage. Current students can make better habits for themselves based upon the findings of this study and even help impact their futures in positive ways to not be reliant on their cellphones throughout the day.

Future studies could focus on different aspects of screen time topic conversation. Many different facts were not considered within this study. Researchers could look into the ways mental health can affect screen time on cellphones and how that may have an overall impact on academic performance. Other studies could look at the way all screen time devices together could majorly impact a student’s academic performance. Looking into other age groups and how their screen time may have shifted within the last decade could also be beneficial to adding new knowledge to the existing academic conversation.

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I hereby affirm that the work contained in this Process and Reflection Portfolio is my own and that I have read and understand the AP Capstone Policy on Plagiarism