Dr. Armendariz conducts psychological research that examines factors associated with college student academic performance. He administered a survey to 127 participants from his university’s student subject pool. In the survey, he asked students to report their current college grade point average (GPA). Dr. Armendariz also asked questions about sleeping, eating habits, and social media use.

In addition, he asked ten questions that assessed anxiety. Participants indicated their responses to each anxiety item on a 5-point scale, where 1 indicated no anxiety and 5 indicated extreme anxiety. Dr. Armendariz summed each participant’s answers to these 10 items to form one anxiety score.

Dr. Armendariz analyzed the data and found that the correlation between anxiety and academic performance was −.64 (results significant) and that the relationship between hours sleeping per night and academic performance was a correlation of 0.

Part A

Based on these data, state the most appropriate conclusions Dr. Armendariz could make about the relationship between the following.

Hours sleeping per night and academic performance
Part B

Explain how the following may contribute to the interpretation of Dr. Armendariz’s findings.

Confounding variable