• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Without More Snooze, Study Says Students Lose

Posted on: Wednesday, 15 June 2005, 12:10 CDT

CHICAGO -- Each morning before classes begin, Jasmine Jones pops a wad of gum into her mouth in a futile attempt to stay alert.

Like many of her Oak Park, Ill., and River Forest, Ill., high school peers, the 8 a.m. start leaves her bleary-eyed and yearning for about two more hours of sleep.

"You have to drag yourself out of bed," said the 16-year-old sophomore, busily chewing her gum during a recent first-period English class. "They expect you to do your best job. But you can't because you're so tired."

Jones' desire for a couple more hours of sleep on school nights is supported by a study released this week that quantifies how much snooze time the average teen loses during a typical school day compared with other times. A team of researchers in Evanston, Ill., found that teens sleep as much as two hours less on school nights than on weekend and summer nights.

The results likewise showed that teens performed better on computer-administered alertness tests during the afternoon than in the morning, and that adding bright light to a classroom in the early morning doesn't lead to enhanced alertness or performance.

"One of the major findings is the sleep that is lost," said Mary A. Carskadon, director of the Bradley Hospital Sleep and Chronobiology Research Laboratory, a leading national sleep researcher.

The study of adolescent sleep habits appears in the current issue of Pediatrics, a journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The findings add to the growing literature about the effect of sleep deprivation on adolescents' lives, including their academic performance, athletic ability and driving capabilities, experts say.

"This is just one little piece of the puzzle," said Martha Hansen, the study's lead author and an Advanced Placement biology teacher and science department chairperson at Evanston High School.

It's a piece, however, that she hopes will convince school administrators to start class at least a half-hour later. She also would like to see standardized testing begin at 10 a.m. instead of the typical 8 a.m.

The study's authors, including Hansen and one of her former students, conducted the yearlong experiment during the 1997-98 school year. The study involved up to 55 juniors and seniors taking Advanced Placement biology.

Several Evanston students, including study co-author and 1999 graduate Adam Schiff, spent years collecting and analyzing the data gathered during 1997-98. The study was partially funded by the Center for Sleep and Circadian Biology at Northwestern University.

Researchers studied diaries in which students chronicled their sleep habits, including when they went to sleep, whether they woke up during the night and if they took naps. The students kept the diaries beginning in August 1997 and through the first half of September, November and February of the 1997-98 school year.

Their average amount of sleep per night was 8.7 hours during weekdays in August, compared with 7 hours during weekdays in September.

"The problem is that they don't recover the sleep, so they are less efficient, their performance is reduced and they get irritable and angry," said study co-author Margarita Dubocovich, a Northwestern University professor of molecular pharmacology and biological chemistry.

Other studies have found that it's normal for adolescents to go to sleep later at night and wake up later in the day than adults because their circadian rhythms, or biological sleep patterns, are different.

Source: Tulsa World

More News in this Category