THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN BREAKFAST AND ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE AMONG IIUM STUDENTS

1. INTRODUCTION Education is a dominant feature nowadays. Striving for the best education in our lives is an important aspect of our society. Sometimes people without education will find it very hard to develop the skills needed for everyday life. It is necessary to know that going to school or pursuing studies in higher level alone is not enough. Instead students should perform well and have good achievement in their studies. A lot of researches have been done to promote and come up with ways to make students perform well in their academic achievement. But most of them overlook the importance of healthy lifestyle habits, in particular, consuming breakfast. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. A good breakfast provides the nutrients that people need to start their day off right.

2. BACKGROUND OF STUDY Breakfast has commonly been practiced worldwide by many people. A good breakfast provides the nutrients that people need to start their day off right. Hence, the present research is conducted to verify whether a positive relationship exists between eating breakfast and academic performance. Fifty undergraduate students consist of twenty five males and twenty five females from International Islamic University Malaysia will be the participants in this study. The participants will be randomly chosen from the Kulliyyah of IRKHS, range between 19 to 25 years old. They will be given a set of questionnaire which consists of few close ended questions, pertaining about their consumption of breakfast before starting off their school days and their performance throughout the class time. Their answers based on the survey will be evaluated afterwards.

3. PROBLEM STATEMENT The present study aims to show the importance of breakfast especially in students life in order to enhance their performance. Eating breakfast in the morning, especially for students, has been shown from past researches to be correlated with students performance. Students might show improvement on their memory, tests performance, cognitive processes and many other aspects after taking their breakfast meal before going to school. Thus, it is hypothesized and expected from this present study that students who eat breakfast before starting their school days are more likely to have a positive influence on their academic performance in terms of memory, alertness and concentration during class time.

4. JUSTIFICATION OF THE PROBLEM This topic is very important as it tries to discover another way to improve students performance in their academic achievement. The topic has been chosen to answer few

questions that have been raised in contrast to the correlation between breakfast and academic performance. Will undergraduate students who eat breakfast perform better in their school rather than students who have not eaten a morning meal? This is to see whether eating breakfast has an impact on their performance. Do students who do not take breakfast before school have a more difficult time staying on task? And does eating breakfast improve school performance? It is important to find out the answers for these kinds of questions as it may contribute to the educational system in improving students progress and performance. 5. SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY Proper nutrition habits shall contribute into growing up of healthy individuals. It is important to give nutrition education on breakfast and its importance and to create awareness in individuals. The significance of the present study is to create awareness among the undergraduate students about the importance of having breakfast regularly. 6. CONCEPTUAL AND OPERATIONAL DEFINITION As we can see, the two variables in this current paper are eating breakfast and academic performance. Breakfast is literally defined by Nicklas, Bao, Webber and Berenson (1993), as a central component of nutritional well-being which contributes to total daily energy and nutrient intake. While academic performance is conceptually defined as the achievement through the percentage of students at-or-above grade level (Carroll). However for the purpose of this present paper, the term breakfast is operationally defined to eating nutritional food before going off to school. The other variable which is academic performance is measured by the students performance in terms of their memory, alertness and concentration during class time.

7. LITERATURE REVIEW Studies have shown that children who eat a good breakfast tend to perform better in school, and have a better attendance and decreased hyperactivity. However, children who do not eat breakfast tend to perform not as well, and also tend to have behaviour problems such as fighting, stealing, and not listening to their teachers. One of the studies conducted by Bagwell (2000) can be related to the present study as it highlights the relationship between eating breakfast and school performance of the college students. Breakfast included eating it before school while school performance included attention span in class, mood in class, note taking in class and test taking skills. It is expected is the study that the more a student eats breakfast before school, the greater the school performance that he or she will display. The study used 96 participants of undergraduate students from Loyola University over the age of 18. The participants were given a set of questionnaire pertaining to their performance in classes and their breakfast habits. They were given a memory test also to test their memory performance. Result from the study showed that breakfast does show an impact on the students performance but not as much as previously expected by the researcher. Another research has been done by Florence, Asbridge and Veugelers (2008) which examined the association between overall diet quality and academic performance. The research suggested some positive effect of breakfast on performance of specific cognitive tasks. It took about 5200 grade 5 students in the province of Nova Scotia, Canada to be the participants of the study. Those students including their parents were surveyed as part of the Childrens Lifestyle and School-performance Study. Information on dietary intake, height, weight and sociodemographic variables were linked to results of a provincial standardized literacy assessment. Multilevel regression methods were used to examine the association between indicators of diet quality and academic performance while adjusting for gender and
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socioeconomic characteristics of parents and residential neighbourhoods. Results from the study revealed that students with decreased overall diet quality were significantly more likely to perform poorly on the assessment. Girls were seemed to perform better than boys as did children from socioeconomically advantaged families. Thus, the findings demonstrated an association between diet quality and academic performance and hence identify specific dietary factors that contributed to the association. In contrast, Shaw (1998) had studied on Australian adolescence breakfast skipping. The report of this study concerned about the extent to which 699 thirteen-year-old adolescents skip their breakfast. The study used a longitudinal design where the researcher studied 8556 pregnant women starting from the time of their first clinic visit. The study was conducted for a long time of follow-up since it included the children of those pregnant women till their age reached 13 years old. Both the mother and her child were asked to complete questionnaires. The results indicated that approximately 12% of the sample (from the adolescents) skipped their breakfast. Gender was the only statistically significant sociodemographic variable, with females skipping at over three times the rate of males. Those skippers were more likely to be dissatisfied with their body shape and to have been on diet to lose weight than were those who ate breakfast. However in a follow-up of telephone survey, the reasons given from those adolescents for skipping breakfast were almost exclusively lack of time and not being hungry in the morning. These findings suggest that, for Australian adolescents, skipping breakfast is a matter of individual choice rather than other kind of issues. By looking at this study, we can see that the importance of eating a good breakfast does not end after adolescence, but it is essential part of a healthy lifestyle. Phillips (2005) had examined the impact and effect of eating breakfast on the performance of college students in their Biology exams. He studied the breakfast eating habits of 1259 college students over an eleven year period of time to determine whether
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eating breakfast had an impact upon their grade on a General Biology exam. The fundamental question that drove the researcher to conduct this study was to determine if there were significant differences in the performance on Biology exams of college students who had eaten breakfast and those who had not eaten it. The study found that only 65.6% of the students participating in the study had eaten breakfast. It also showed that students who ate breakfast had a higher success rate on Biology exams than those who did not eat breakfast. This finding provides a platform from which to strongly encourage college students to take breakfast as a method of augmenting their study strategies and maintaining a healthy positive life style. Although this study was only conducted in General Biology classes at Blinn College, it may suggest a trend at colleges in general. The results from this study support the general conclusion that eating breakfast has an effect on test results.

A study that was conducted by Gajre, Fernandez, Balakrishna and Vazir (2007) on Breakfast Eating Habit and its Influence on Attention-concentration, Immediate Memory and School Achievement is to study the relationship of breakfast to the attentionconcentration, immediate recall memory, nutritional status as well academic achievement amongst school children 11 to 13 years old. The researchers believe that students who consume breakfast regularly as well have good nutritional status and attend school regularly; these will positively influence their attention-concentration, memory and academic performance. The research included 379 school children divided the participants into three different categories where the first group comprised those who are consume breakfast regularly, secondly is those who consumed it irregularly and skip it 2 to three times per week whereas the last group is those who do not consume breakfast at all. As a result, the regular breakfast group achieved the highest mean score in the latter cancellation test compared to the no breakfast group, indeed consume breakfast have significant association with their immediate memory recall. Moreover, breakfast group also score highest in Science, Math and
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English exam compare to no breakfast group. Therefore, the finding is support the hypothesis. However, since this research also concerned about the nutritional status as well attendance in determining students concentration and school performance, perhaps actually these two factor which contributed more to their performance compared to breakfast eating. Based on another study (Murphyf et al., 2002) eating breakfast which contain enough nutrient improve school performance amongst the children.

Another study interested to focus on the improvement of nutrient intake and academic performance and psychosocial functioning after the start of universal free school breakfast program (Murphyf et al., 2002). The researchers believed that one way to prevent problems related with child hunger would be to enhance an existing governmental food program. Before the program started, more children were classified have less nutrient intake. Those children who were significantly poor in attendance, punctuality and grades at school have more behaviour problems compared to children who have enough nutrient intakes. After six months of involving in the free school breakfast program, children with low nutrient intake showed improvement in attendance, school performance as well in their behaviour compared to those who were not. The result indicated that breakfast does enhance the improvement of students in their academic performance. Breakfast is indeed important in correlation with the improvement of students performance but the nutrition intake does matter and must be taken into consideration too.

One more study about breakfast consumption not only focused on its relation to academic performance but interestingly it also looked whether it relates to mental distress in adolescents in all junior high school in Oslo, Norway (Lars Lien, 2007). Indeed, this study comprised both gender male and female as well as immigrants. More of Norwegian and Western people eating breakfast compared to immigrants. Besides, more boys being mentally

distressed when they skip breakfast compared to girls. In contrast, immigrants were seemed to be more distress when they skip breakfast compared to Norwegians. In academic performance, more girls acquired better grade than boys while more Norwegians had good grade compared to immigrants. Therefore, the implication of skipping breakfast is higher in boys compared to girls and higher for Norwegians than immigrants. Since more boys experience mental distress due to skip breakfast, they are not able to concentrate in class compared to girls. Consequently, this may lead to their low grades in academic performance.

Hence, there are indeed a number of studies that have been conducted upon examining the link between eating breakfast and performance in school, which have focused on public school, preschool and elementary-aged children. Fewer studies have focused on college student while lesser of it focused on undergraduate students. Thus, the present study is important as it tries to look into the link or relationship between eating breakfast and the academic performance of undergraduate students of IIUM.

8. METHODOLOGY 8.1 Sample The participants of this study will be among the undergraduate students of Kulliyyah Islamic Revealed Knowledge and Human Sciences (IRKHS), of International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM). The number of participants will comprise of 50 students; 25 males ad 25 females in the range of age between 19 to 25 years old. Thus, they will be selected randomly by using non-probability sampling method. The selection of the participants would be based on convenience availability. 8.2 Measures In order to collect the data, the researchers will use sets of questionnaires as the tool of the study. The questionnaire is developed to measure the relationship between eating breakfast and level of alertness during classes among the participants as well their academic performance. The questionnaire consists of three different parts close-ended questions. The first part asked about demographic information such as age, gender, nationality as well as level of study. Whereas the second part of the questionnaire consists of seven questions pertaining to students performance in class before lunch hour such as their concentration, alertness, attention and participation during class time. Then the third part of the questionnaire is about breakfast consumption among the students. The example of the questionnaire will be included in Appendix A. 8.3 Procedure The study will be conducted in a descriptive, cross-sectional design by using a selfadministered questionnaire. As mentioned earlier, the researchers will randomly select the IRKHS students with different gender and level of study based on their availability. We will
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orally mention about the informed consent and ask their willingness to be part of the research. Then we will distribute the questionnaire which consists of three parts. The participants will be given a period of time for about 10 to 15 minutes approximately to complete the questionnaire. After completing them, the researchers will debrief them regarding about the aims and the importance of their participation in fulfilling the study. Then, they will be asked about their feedback based on the questions given. The feedback will be evaluated afterwards together with the results.

8.4 Data Analysis

After gathering the data, it will be evaluated and analyzed thoroughly. It is assumed that the data will consist of different types of answers and opinions based on the participants who consume breakfast and who do not consume it. Therefore, it will be analyzed by using ttest in hypothesis testing. The data obtained would be presented in the form of table, pie chart, or even graph. The results from this study will determine whether the hypothesis is accepted or not.

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9. Appendix A
Part A: Demographic Information

Age:

Gender:

Nationality:

Level of Study:

Part B: Class Performance

On each of the following questions, please circle or tick the choice that best defines you.

1. Before lunch, how alert do you feel in your classes?

Very alert 1

Alert 2

Somewhat alert 3

Not alert 4

2. How often do you participate in your classes before lunch?

Very often 1

Often 2

Sometimes 3

Very little 4

Never 5

3. How long is your attention span in class before lunch?

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100% of class time 1

75% of class time 2

50% of class time 3

25% of class time 4

25% of class time 5

4. How hard do you find it to concentrate in class before lunch?

Not hard 1

Somewhat hard 2

Hard 3

Very hard 4

5. In general, how would you describe your mood in classes before lunch?

Highly positive

Somewhat positive

Neutral

Somewhat negative

Negative

6. How often do you take notes in your classes before lunch?

Frequently 1

Somewhat often 2

Sometimes 3

Seldom 4

Never 5

7. During tests, how much anxiety do you generally experience in classes before lunch?

No anxiety 1

Little anxiety 2

Some anxiety 3

Anxiety 4

High anxiety 5

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Part C: Breakfast Consumption

Please present us with the following information about yourself.

1. Do you eat breakfast? (Circle one)

Yes 1

No 2

2. If you answered yes to question #1, how often do you eat breakfast?

Everyday 1

Often 2

Sometimes 3

Very little 4

3. If you answered yes to question #1, when are you most likely to eat breakfast?

Before school

On weekends

Before a test

Any other time?

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4. For the following list, please put a check next to the item(s) that you tend to eat/drink for breakfast. You may check as many that apply to you. Also, please circle how often you tend to eat/drink the item(s) you check off.

Checklist

Very often

Often

Sometimes

Very little

1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 Bacon Bagels Bagels with spread Biscuits Biscuits with butter Biscuits with jelly Cereal Eggs Fast food breakfast Muffin Pancakes Pizza Pop tarts Sandwich Sausage Toast Toast with butter Toast with jelly

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19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Waffles Yogurt Soda Coffee Juice Milk Other

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10. REFERENCES

Bagwell, S. E. (2000). The Relationship Between Breakfast and School Performance. Department of Arts and Science . C., B. R. (n.d.). The Effects of School Violence and Crime on Academic Achievement. Davidson College . Florence, M. D. (2008). Diet Quality and Academic Performance. Journal of School Health, American School Health Association , 78(4). Lien, L. (2007). Is breakfast consumption related to mental distress and academic performance in adolescents? . Public Health Nutrition , 422-428. Murphyf, R. K.-R. (2002). Diet,Breakfast,and Academic Performance in Children. Annal of Nutrition & Metabolism , 24-30. Nicklas, T. A., Bao, W., Webber, L. S., & Berenson, G. S. (1993). Breakfast consumption affects adequacy of total daily intake in children. Journal of American Dietetic Association, 93(8). NS Gajre, S. F. (2007). Breakfast Eating Habits and its Influence on AttentionConcentration,Iimmediate Memory and School Achievement. Indian Pediatrics , 824-828. Phillips, G. W. (2005). Does Eating Breakfast Affect the Performance of College Students on Biology Exams? Division of Natural Sciences , 30(4). Shaw, M. E. (1998). Adolescent Breakfast Skipping: An Australian Study. 33(132): 851-861.

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