This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.
Trading sleep for studying led to academic problems the next day
Regardless of how much they generally studied each day, high school students who sacrificed sleep time to study more than usual were more likely to face academic problems the following day, according to study results published in Child Development.
“This study provides more evidence that sleep is critical for academic success,” study researcher Cari Gillen-O’Neel, a PhD student at the University of California, Los Angeles, told Healio.com. “In the daily lives of adolescents, sacrificing sleep is associated with more academic problems the following day, even if that sacrifice was made to get additional study time. Thus, students should make every effort to protect what little sleep they get, either by maintaining a consistent study schedule or by sacrificing other daily activities for more study time.”
Cari Gillen-O’Neel
According to the 2006 Sleep in America Poll, conducted by the National Sleep Foundation, only about 9% of high school students sleep for at least the recommended 9 hours or more per school night. One-fourth of students get between 8 and 9 hours — the borderline amount — and 62% get an insufficient amount of sleep with less than 8 hours.
Gillen-O’Neel and colleagues conducted a longitudinal study that focused on 535 students from Los Angeles-area high schools who completed daily diaries about how long they studied and slept and whether they experienced academic problems the following day, including not understanding material taught in class or doing poorly on an assignment or test.
Diaries were kept every day for 14 days at ninth, 10th and 12th grades.
Although the researchers expected that extra studying at night might not be as effective as students thought, they were surprised to find that extra studying was associated with poorer academic performance the following day.
“This surprising finding, however, made more sense once we examined extra studying in the context of adolescents’ sleep,” they wrote.
Results show that daily study and sleep time were inversely associated in the ninth grade (P<.01). The days on which students reported more time than usual spent studying tended to be the days on which they had fewer hours sleep — this tradeoff between study time and sleep time increased during the course of high school (P<.05).
The researchers wrote that academic success may depend on different time management strategies, such as maintaining a consistent study schedule. Rather than letting deadlines dictate the amount of time spent studying each night, students can distribute time dedicated to homework more evenly across days. On those days in which students must devote more time than usual to an assignment, they should make every effort to protect their sleep time. Students can make a greater effort to use their school time as efficiently as possible, taking advantage of free periods to complete additional work. Students can also sacrifice other activities, such as watching television or socializing, for more study time.
Disclosure: The study was supported by a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation. The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures.
