Lower school performance in late chronotypes: underlying factors and mechanisms

Abstract

Success at school determines future career opportunities. We described a time-of-day specific disparity in school performance between early and late chronotypes. Several studies showed that students with a late chronotype and short sleep duration obtain lower grades, suggesting that early school starting times handicap their performance. How chronotype, sleep duration, and time of day impact school performance is not clear. At a Dutch high school, we collected 40,890 grades obtained in a variety of school subjects over an entire school year. We found that the strength of the effect of chronotype on grades was similar to that of absenteeism, and that late chronotypes were more often absent. The difference in grades between the earliest 20% and the latest 20% of chronotypes corresponds to a drop from the 55th to 43rd percentile of grades. In academic subjects using mainly fluid cognition (scientific subjects), the correlation with grades and chronotype was significant while subjects relying on crystallised intelligence (humanistic/linguistic) showed no correlation with chronotype. Based on these and previous results, we can expand our earlier findings concerning exam times: students with a late chronotype are at a disadvantage in exams on scientific subjects, and when they are examined early in the day.

Impact of sleep problems on daytime function in school life: a cross-sectional study involving Japanese university students

“…This result coincided with the findings of previous studies that reported a similar association between sleep problems and worsened academic performance e.g. grade point or ranking [8,9,12].…”

“…Moreover, early awakening to adapt to their social schedule (e.g., for attending classes early in the morning) consequently brings about insufficient sleep especially in evening-type students. Numerous studies have reported that either insufficient sleep or later chronotype is associated with deterioration of physical health, mental health [3][4][5] and health-related quality of life [6,7] as well as worse academic performance [8][9][10][11][12] in the young population.…”

“…However, related factors and association with daytime dysfunction might differ among students with different sleep problems. Furthermore, few studies have evaluated daytime dysfunction in school life, such as absence, tardiness, and falling asleep during class, although test scores (e.g., grade point average) have been used to evaluate academic performance [8,9,12].…”

Electroencephalographic and skin temperature indices of vigilance and inhibitory control

“…Overall, adolescent show time-of-day effects on attention and mood, with lowest levels in the early morning during the school day (Escribano & Díaz-Morales, 2014;Díaz-Morales, Escribano, & Jankowski, 2015). Moreover, academic achievement could be compromised if we considered chronotype, particularly for evening-type students (Goldstein, Hahn, Hasher, Wiprzycka, & Zelazo, 2007;Escribano & Díaz-Morales, 2016;Zerbini et al, 2017). Future research should take into account the neglected effects of both time of day and chronotype.…”

Tardiness Increases in Winter: Evidence for Annual Rhythms in Humans

“…We predicted that absenteeism would peak in winter, because sick leaves are more likely to occur during the colder months, and because sleep timing, especially in late chronotypes (those who sleep late), is later in winter compared with summer (Allebrandt et al, 2014). In addition, we predicted grades would be lower in winter because of the negative effect of absenteeism on grades that has been previously described (Zerbini et al, 2017;Onyper et al, 2012).…”