We thought that the short-term memory of all of our test subjects would be increased by 15% while chewing gum as compared to scores of tests taken while not chewing gum.

As stated in the research of D. Duetsch (1975), there is a clear distinction between memory for events that occur within a few seconds and for those that occurred before that. So, we thought that in the testing, the majority of the words remembered would be those at the beginning of the lists, having been stored in long-term memory, and those at the end of the list, stored in short-term memory.

We also compared the scores of our subjects by their grade level and their gender. In work done by Jaquith (1996) it was found that students were able to remember more of a sequence the older they were. Because of this, we thought that our subjects in higher grades and the Upper School, would have higher scores and be able to remember more words than their younger counterparts in both tests taken with gum and without. We thought that in all grade levels, and in both the tests taken with gum and those without, boys would be able to remember more of the words from the lists than girls of the same grade level.