fairfolio
Saved Projects

The Effect of Caffeine on Alertness

CSEF · 2003 Behavioral Sciences

Sean M. O'Brien · Heritage Christian Academy, Ojai

Overview

Objectives/Goals My objective was to find out what effect caffeine would have on the results of a math speed test, relating to both speed and accuracy. Methods/Materials I administered three similar, but slightly different 64-problem math tests under three different conditions: 1. without caffeine, 2. after having ingested 54mg. of caffeine (from a can of Mountain Dew soda), and 3. after having ingested another 54mg. of caffeine, totaling 108mg. We timed ourselves on each test and waited 30 minutes after drinking the soda before taking tests #2 & #3. Later I corrected the tests. Results The results show that the intake of caffeine helped the participants improve their test performance. The time it took to complete the tests was faster, and the number of errors were lower. Conclusions/Discussion My conclusion is that caffeine improves alertness and in moderate amounts can actually help students perform better on tests.

Summary statement

My project is about how caffeine might effect math test performance.

Help received

Mother helped conduct experiments, Mrs. Biggers provided math tests for experiments.

Competition history

  • CSEF 2003 Behavioral Sciences · Entry J0330

Resources

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

Source: California Science & Engineering Fair public projects

Save projects to your library

Sign in with Google to keep track of projects you find interesting, organized into folders. An account also raises your daily allowance for “Has this been done?”, and lets you create a key for the MCP server with a much higher limit than anonymous use. Browsing stays public.

Continue with Google