In sixth grade my English teacher would hand out gum before each quiz we took, and tell us that it would help us focus. I believed her considering she was older and smarter, and ever since 6th grade English I have chewed a piece of mint gum during almost every quiz, test or exam I’ve taken, but does gum actually help you focus?
In a study done at St. Lawrence University in 2011, by a team of psychologist, they took 159 students and split them into 3 groups. Sugar free gum chewers, sugar added gum chewers, and non-gum chewers. They then put the students through a series of 6 cognitive tests and the results found that chewing gum lead to better performance in 5 of the 6 tests (WIRED.com). The sixth test was a verbal fluency test in which the subjects were asked to name as many animals as they could. Also concluded from the results was that sugar had no effect on how the subjects preformed.
However it was found that this advantage while chewing gum only lasts around 15 to 20 minutes and then it disappears. Researchers attributed the success to arousal caused by the gum, which increases heart rate, blood pressure, and cerebral blood flow (NBC News). However the exact cause is truly unknown and is still up in the air. It will require more studies in order to determine an exact cause.
This experiment run at St. Lawrence however does seem to have flaws such as the control of outside factors, such as the students amount of sleep the night before or whether they ate before the experiment. These outside factors could have played a role in the results. We also cannot rule out chance. But looking at the experiments results I believe we can assume until further tested that gum did have an effect, and a good one, even if only for a short period of time.
So with the semester about halfway done, and exams plentiful, purchase a pack of your favorite gum and get chewing during your next exam. The 20 minutes of focus can only better impact your grade plus gum tastes good! I know I will be keeping my tradition of chewing minty gum for each exam going and I believe it helps and will continue to believe this until experiments prove me otherwise.
Work Cited:
Lehrer, Jonah. “The Cognitive Benefits Of Chewing Gum | WIRED.”Wired.com. Conde Nast Digital, 27 Nov. 0011. Web. 20 Oct. 2014.
Onyper, Serge. “Commentary: Chewing Gum May Improve Test Scores – NBC News.” NBC News. NBC, n.d. Web. 21 Oct. 2014
I found this interesting because I have heard of this in the past, specifically with mint flavored gums. It made me look into what types of different activities may be able to assist you in school as well and I came upon this article, check it out. http://www.corepower.com/blog/tip-day-dispelling-myth-eating-before-bed
I found this topic very interesting because I was always told to chew gum during tests too. This is definitely a topic I wanted to know more about so I did some further research. This article is pretty interesting as well http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2072816/Chewing-gum-tests-improves-scores.html. I was always told chewing gum during tests was to calm you nerves so this may be true. It is interesting that it only works for the first 20 minutes. I would like to know more information on why only that amount of time.
My brother has always had a thing about chewing gum during tests and at school in general. He’s claimed for years that it has helped him. Heres another study I found that claims that gum helps you focus better. You should check it out! http://www.bps.org.uk/news/chewing-gum-helps-you-concentrate-longer
This is very interesting! I remember before I took the PSAT’s the proctor that was reading aloud the test described the rule that declared the students taking the test aren’t allowed to chew gum. However, she told us that she doesn’t enforce this rule, because it was proven to relax students which results in higher grades. I didn’t know she was actually right!
I agree, we do not know whether chewing gum does truly work and more experiments need to be done before we will know but I’d say based off the one experiment it looks as though gum does have some effect whether it be psychological or physical.
Interesting blog! In addition to chewing gum before exams, I’ve heard that chewing gum while studying for an exam and then chewing the ext a same flavor gum during the exam helps students remember what they studied. Also, I’ve heard chocolate before and during an exam helps – or maybe it’s just another excuse to eat chocolate. This articles touches upon the point you made: http://www.livescience.com/17520-chewing-gum-test-performance.html
I have been doing this for a while and believe that gum does help me focus. I don’t think that there is enough proof here to prove that the gum actually helps though. There could be other variables that effect this such as if the children ate breakfast or not or maybe if they had enough sleep or not. In psychology, we learned that if we tell ourselves something for a while, then to the person, it will start coming true. It doesn’t mean that it is necessarily true to everyone.
This is an interesting topic. I never chewed gum while taking an exam because I always assumed that it would distract me. I like how you mentioned that the data could be due to chance. However, I wonder if reverse causation could be a possibility as well. Instead of chewing to make you do well on a exam, it could be that smarter students have a higher tendency to chew gum while taking an exam. If this was the case, the correlation would still be the same.
This is a great idea and would definitely help improve the experiment. I think gum chewing and grades is such a minute scientific topic of interest so larger and better done experiments just won’t happen in my opinion. Also thanks for the article, it was definitely a cool read.
Some studies show that chewing gum may help while studying, but not actually during the test. The chewing motion gets blood flowing in the head triggering an improvement in memory for many people, which would then help you during the test. Maybe give this a try as well! Here is the link to the article I read on this. http://www.livescience.com/17520-chewing-gum-test-performance.html
I can relate because in 5th and 6th grade my teachers would always hand out gum or mints to improve our performance. You did a good job about remembering what Andrew taught us about our results coming out due to chance. You listed all the other z variables that could have contributed to the results. Now while the correlation is very strong we must also think about the subjects that we tested. What if by chance the children that got the gum were naturally smarter than the group the did not chew gum; and that attributed to their higher test scores. To avoid this we should give all the subjects a test (no gum included) and only test the ones that get the same score. This way we can be sure that they all entered the experiment with the same amount of knowledge. Speaking about certain kids being smarter than other it it said that bilingual kids are smarter than others who only know one language. What if you had more bilingual students in the gum chewing study than in the non gum chewing study and this accounted for your results. Take a look at this link suggesting bilingual children are smarter http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/09/04/bilingual-children_n_5766966.html