Franchesca Roque

AP Psychology Unit 1 Project

Scott

Section 1: Descriptive Research Study Design

1-1. Does stress level affect a student’s performance level?
1-2. The psychological approach that will be used is cognitive because it focuses on a person’s thought
process and how it affects their behavior.
1-3. The case study method is best for this research because the researcher would be able to collect data
from groups or individuals to make conclusions
1-4. Participants will be selected with the same number of boys and girls from freshmen to seniors.
Groups will be made according to their grade, for example, freshmen will stay together so will the
sophomore, and so on. For each grade, there would be two groups with randomly selected equal amount
of boys and girls. The first group for each grade will be the control group and the second group will be the
experimental group. All of them will be asked to do the same number of tasks, however, the experimental
groups will be given a set of time while the control groups aren’t. After doing the tasks, all students in the
experimental groups will be asked to indicate their stress level during the tasks based on a stress scale.
Once the data is completed, the students will be told on how they did on the assignment.
1-5. Types of conclusion drawn from the study are: the effects of stress on teenagers, what part/s of the
brain is/are active when one is under pressure, how do teenagers handle stress when asked to finish tasks,
and how different genders problem solve.
1-6. It’s possible to generalize the findings only to high school students because random sampling was
picked only from high schoolers.

Section 2: Correlation Research Study Design

2-1. Time completion of tasks and stress level
2-2. Poor performance with assigned tasks can be cause by applying pressure
2-3. Survey can be used to gather data from the participants because it may reveal confounding
variables that may have affected the participant’s performance other than stress. For example, participants
may ask how much sleep did they get last night and that may have affected their performance.
2-4. Column 1 will be named Grade Level, column 2 will be Stress Level, and column 3 will be Time
2-5. I will make a graph based on the data collected to see if shows a negative or positive relationship. I
can draw conclusions such as stress level gets higher, the higher time for the participants to perform their
tasks. I can’t draw conclusions that doesn’t connect to my research. For example, as stress level gets
higher, the participants will to do anything gets higher. This conclusion doesn’t make sense at all because
it doesn’t mention how the feeling of stress affects the participant’s performance level.
 2-6.
Grade Level Stress Level Time min:sec

9th 4 5:09

10th 5 6:34

11th 6 7:57

12th 8 10:01

Section 3: Experimental Research Study Design

3-1. People with higher stress level takes longer time to finish their task than people who aren’t as
stressed because it puts pressure on the person, therefore, it’ll prevent them from doing their best while
being calm with the tasks.
3-2. Independent variable is stress level and dependent variable is time.
3-3. Time: a number measured in minutes and seconds to represent the participant’s time of completion
Stress Level: measure of the participant’s feeling of stress according to a scale ranging from 1-10 being 1
not stressed at all and 10 being overwhelmingly stressed.
3-4. The experiment will neither be a single blind procedure nor a double blind procedure because the
participants and the researchers know that the participants will be given the same amount and type of
tasks. The control group will not be given a timer while the experimental group will. But before the
experiment starts, researchers will ask the experimental group if they have any medical issues and this
will be the confounding variable.
3-5. Since the participants are in groups, descriptive statistics can be used to apply to properly interpret
the findings because it’s a numerical data that measures tendency and it describe characteristics of a
group. Standard deviation is a type of descriptive statistic that calculates the range of data of the group as
a whole. This technique will give researchers an idea to generalize from the population.
3-6. There’s a positive correlation between time and stress. Researchers can conclude that as stress level
gets higher, time of completion also gets higher. This conclusion can only be generalized for high school
students because the sample was randomly picked specifically from students in between the grades of 9th
to 10th.