Association of Sleep and Academic Performance

Abstract

Poor school performance by adolescent students has been attributed in part to insufficient sleep. It is recognized that a number of factors lead to diminished total sleep time and chief among these are early school start times and sleep phase delay in adolescence. Political initiatives are gaining momentum across the United States to require later school start times with the intent of increasing total sleep time and consequently improving school performance. Later school start times come with significant costs and impact other activities of families and communities. The decision to implement later school start times cannot be made lightly and deserves support of well-performed research on the impact of these changes. A study evaluating the association of academic performance and total sleep time was performed in middle school and high school students in a suburban Maryland school system. Preliminary results of this study show no correlation of total sleep time with academic performance. Before mandating costly changes in school schedules, it would be useful to perform further research to determine the effects of increasing sleep time on the behaviors of adolescent students.

Social jetlag, academic achievement and cognitive performance: Understanding gender/sex differences

“…For example, sleep disturbances at 16 years of age predict sleep disturbances in adulthood (Dregan & Armstrong, 2010). However, although the relationship between sleep length and academic performance has been meta-analyzed (Dewald et al, 2010), some studies have not found associations between sleep quantity or quality and academic achievement (Eliasson et al, 2002).…”

High School Start Times and the Impact on High School Students: What We Know, and What We Hope to Learn

“…Our search strategy resulted in 18 studies in total, including 10 cross-sectional studies comparing 2 contemporaneous student populations with different start times, 18,19,23,24,26,[28][29][30][31][32] 7 prospective studies evaluating the effect of school start times within the same school populations, 8,17,20,21,[33][34][35] and 1 retrospective historical cohort study that compared outcomes in school populations of one geographical area separated by many years (and therefore different actual students). 36 Although most studies evaluated public school populations, two prospective studies evaluated the effect of school-start time changes on outcomes in a boarding school population.…”

Academic Performance among Adolescents with Behaviorally Induced Insufficient Sleep Syndrome

“…1 However, others have found no signifi cant association between academic performances and sleep duration in adolescents or in medical college students. 2,3 This discrepancy may be explained by the fact that sleep duration cannot exactly represent the unmet sleep need for each individual.…”