Corbin Miller and Dr. Joseph Price, Department of Economics
The purpose of my project is to discover whether or not there is a link between the nutritional quality of food served for elementary school lunch and test scores. Our hypothesis is that eating a more healthy meal prior to taking a test will improve cognitive performance. The two sources of data that are required for this project to succeed are the school lunch menu data and the corresponding test scores. I have already retrieved the school lunch menu data from Westridge and Rock Canyon elementary schools in the Provo School District. We are currently waiting on permission to access the standardized test score data from last spring, which is the time frame for the menu data we have.
The ideal situation for this project would be to obtain a random sample of schools from a random sample of school districts throughout the country. That way our findings can be generalized to apply to all American children. The drawback of this extreme is that it would require a huge amount of work and coordination to get that data. In the mean time we will just use a small sample of schools and see if the effect is present. If we have significant results then we can move forward and expand our data set to other places in the country.
One of our concerns is that the Provo School District is a fairly homogenous district as far as national averages. One of the things we have done to address this is to pool our data with that gathered in Texas to try and avoid having individuals that are too similar. We are working in conjunction with Dr. Joseph Price’s brother, Joshua Price who is an assistant professor of economics at the University Texas at Arlington. If our results end up being interesting then we will try to expand to other school districts in the country.
We are still optimistic that our research will culminate in a published paper whose results will be important for the motivation of related topics in the future. I have certainly learned more about the research process through working on this project. Mostly I have learned that sometimes research takes time, which is why professors like Dr. Price have so many projects going at once. Some of the other projects I have worked on in the mean time include trying to estimate the number of children being raised by gay and lesbian parents and the emotional and health benefits of having grandchildren.
