Want to improve your grades? Sleep more!

With Semester 1 just ended and students now focussing on working through a successful second semester, I (and many of you) have been talking to students and parents about changes they can make to see greater improvement in their learning. Usually, that conversation starts with studying more, but recent research suggests that sleeping more is just as important.

The study titled “Sacrificing sleep to study can lead to academic problems”, showed that

“across the years of high school, the trade-off between daily study time and sleep becomes increasingly associated with academic problems” (pp. 139).

The study also found

“that the reduced sleep that tends to occur on nights of extra studying is what accounts for the increase in academic problems that occurs the next day.”

This is not to say that students should not study! The research also acknowledges that there is a link between high achievement and more study, but cautions that the extra study should not be at the expense of sleep.

9 hours of sleep per night is the recommendation for adolescents. In an ongoing survey I have been conducting, after 75 responses, 5.7 hours per night is the average for high school students at the school I lead.

So, if students want to improve their learning, and then as a consequence, their grades, help them to consider the following…

Develop a routine that allows you to sleep 9 hours each night. Spread your study out across all nights of the week, and if you need to put in some extra hours of study, don’t sacrifice your sleep - instead, give up something else that is not as important.

As this study suggests (and other studies confirm), “sleep is a key restorative process during which consolidation of learning takes place.”

Reference:

Society for Research in Child Development. "Sacrificing sleep to study can lead to academic problems." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 21 August 2012. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120821094350.htm>.