Abstract
The goal of this paper is to analyze the influences that mindset, social media, and environment have on each other and the athletic performance of high school student-athletes. Currently, there is a lack of knowledge in student-athletes about what affects the athlete's capability to perform to the best of their ability. Student-athletes can have trouble discerning which of the many influences that they interact with have impact on their athletics, whether those influences are internal, like mindset, or external, like social media and environment. A literature review and a survey of student-athletes was conducted to gather information on this subject. Stress and confidence are both major parts of mindset, with both having influence on athletic performance. Increased confidence or self-esteem consistently improves athletic performance. However, increased stress only has a negative effect on athletic performance for around two-thirds of the student-athletes surveyed. It has variable effects on student-athletes, with those who have been involved in sports for longer being less likely to be negatively affected by stress. Additionally, social media has a surprisingly positive effect on confidence, where student-athletes who used social media but not for anything athletics-related had the best self-rated confidence before a competition. Finally, the social environment of a student-athlete boosts athletic performance for almost every athlete when they receive more support from their peers, their teammates, and their families.
Process
I wrote this paper as part of the Independent Research course at Wilde Lake High School. The class was focused on creating a long-term project throughout the year using checkpoints that allowed for self-pacing. It involved a lot of personal time management, both in and out of class. The first half of the year was for conducting secondary research and adjusting the research question based on the secondary research. The end product of the secondary research was an in-depth annotated bibliography.
The second half of the year was focused on primary research. After conducting two interviews in December and January respectively, everyone in the class designed their own primary research study and wrote a research proposal. The study I designed revolved around distributing a survey to student-athletes at Wilde Lake High School, since my research was focused on high school student-athletes. I collected 51 responses, and used that data to draw conclusnios about mindset, social media, and environment's respective effects on the athletic performance of high school student-athletes. I compared my findings to what I had found in my secondary research, to learn how student-athletes percieved the effects on their athletic performance.
The final product of the course was a full length synthesis paper. After doing a formal full sentence outline for the paper, I used my research to create a review of literature and a primary research analysis. My review of literature was based on my secondary research from the first half of the course, though I had shifted its focus away from physical factors in favor of mental factors affecting athletic performance, so I removed a few sources and topics. Additionally, I wrote primary research methods and data analysis sections for the paper. I included visualizations I made with my data, as well as comparisons with other researchers' findings.
In writing this paper I learned a lot about independent time management, and I feel that I also grew a lot as a writer. Because almost every task in the course was self-paced, I was often responsible for setitng my own short-term goals and chunking out time. This was also my first time writing a formal research paper, so this was a new experience for me that allowed me to learn a lot of skills related to independence and high-level writing.