Effects of Third year Medical Technology Students’ Amount of Sleep, Screen Time, and Physical Activity to their Academic Performance

Abstract

In the past few decades, online learning has been emerging as an alternative to face-to-face learning in a traditional classroom setting. However, it is now the standard mode of delivering classes due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. In relation to online education, there are predictors that might affect academic performance. A descriptive correlational quantitative approach was utilized to investigate the amount of sleep, screen time, and physical activity as predictors for the academic performance of regular 3rd year Medical Technology students of the University of Santo Tomas in board subjects during their first semester of AY 2020-2021. Participants were selected through voluntary sampling technique and online questionnaires were distributed through Google Forms to 287 volunteers that met the inclusion criteria. The questionnaire consists of 4 sections making use of Likert scales and questions mainly concerns participant’s semestral average, the amount of time spent sleeping and on doing certain activities on a screen, and how physically active they were. The descriptive statistics showed that the majority of 3rd Year Medical Technology students met the recommended physical activity and sleeping time on weekends, while failing to meet recommended screen time and sleeping time on weekdays. No significant correlation was found between any of the independent variables and academic performance. Future researchers could search for possible confounding factors influencing both the independent and dependent variables. Conducting the study on the same sample once face-to-face classes resume may allow for further discussion to be made.