The Importance of Sleep for Academic Achievement

BY BETH COOK (WSC)

How students can be supported to improve their sleep.

Students good sleep habits have been shown to have better memory, understanding, and academic achievement than their sleep deprived peers.

Sleepy students are less focused and more easily distracted in class.  They are also missing out on the important functions of sleep, including processing emotions and the transferal of learning to long term memory.  These both have an impact on academic performance. 

Students should be educated on the importance of sleep and encouraged to improve their sleep behaviours to enable them to get more, better quality sleep.

Aims

This project aims to answer the following research questions:

1. To what extent do students feel their sleep impacts their academic achievement?
2. Does educating students about the importance of sleep, strategies to improve it, and ways to maintain those strategies have a positive impact on their sleep and academic achievement?

These questions not only have an impact on student’s academic achievement whilst at college.  The knowledge they will gain about sleep importance and strategies may have a lifelong positive impact on their sleep and related health benefits.  Whether or not students use the sleep strategies to improve their sleep within the study timeframe, they will have the knowledge to implement when they are ready to.

Existing Evidence

There is an inter-relationship between sleep, memory, mental health, and movement (Jones, 2020).  Reduced and poor-quality sleep results in sleepiness and reduced attention spans, as well as potentially limiting the transfer of learning to long term memory (Sharman & Illingworth, 2020).  Adolescents who report short or disturbed sleep are more likely to experience academic failure than those who sleep the recommended seven to eight hours a night (Titova et al., 2015).  There is also growing evidence that attempting to catch up on sleep by sleeping later on weekend mornings alters the structure of the brain, potentially further impacting academic performance and emotional control (Sharman & Illingworth, 2020).

Sleep duration has physiological influences, such as changes to circadian rhythms, as well as psychosocial influences including peer pressure, social medial use, and screen time (Sharman & Illingworth, 2020).  For example, internet use has been shown to have a negative effect on sleep duration (Adelantado-Renau et al., 2019).

The effectiveness of sleep education has started to be studied.  Illingworth et al. (2020) found increases in knowledge but limited improvements in sleep among year 10 students, for example.

Methodology

The Applied Science cohort in year 1 and year 2, comprising four groups, have participated in this study.  Two groups, one from each year, have received mini lessons on sleep within their timetabled lessons, covering:

• Circadian rhythm and how we sleep.
• Importance of sleep to long-term health.
• Importance of sleep to concentration.
• Getting natural light during the day.
• Bedtime routines.
• 3-point check – safe, breath, thinking.
• Sleep tips with Matt Walker.

During the lessons, they have been asked to identify strategies that they currently use, and ones that they feel they can easily start.  These groups have completed pre-intervention and post-intervention questionnaires.

The other two groups have completed the pre-intervention questionnaire only.

Due to lockdown, the post-intervention questionnaire included questions about the effects of the lockdown on sleep.  These were included as it is likely that student’s sleep routines were negatively impacted during this time.

Findings

Whilst there has been some improvement in students feeling sleeping during the day, their reported concentration in class and quality of sleep has declined (table 1).  This may be due to the lockdown period, as only 41.2% of students reported being back to their pre-lockdown sleep patterns (table 2).

Findings from the post-intervention questionnaire show that 76.5% of students feel they have learnt something about sleep.  These included more general things like the importance of sleep, to the more specific, for example that it is better to sleep at 18°c, or that you should not drink caffeine past midday.  Some students have been trying the strategies and have started to see some improvements (see table 3).

The next stage will be to take these findings and design further intervention to increase the uptake and success of the suggested sleep improvement strategies, to encourage students to continue with what they are trying, and to link these to their academic achievements.

Table 1

Table 2

Table 3

References

Adelantado-Renau, M., Diez-Fernandez, A., Beltran-Valis, M.R., Soriano-Maldonado, A., Moliner-Urdiales, D. (2019) The effect of sleep quality on academic performance is mediated by internet use time: DADOS study. Jornal de Pediatria 95(4) 410-418

Gupta, A., Sinha, S., Pribesh, S., Maira, S. (2014) A Fresh Breath into Student Achievement: Prayanama and Educational Outcomes.  International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Invention. 3(10) 38-46.

Illingworth, G., Sharman, R., Harvey, C-J., Foster, R.G., Espie, C.A. (2020) The Teensleep study: the effectiveness of a school-based sleep education programme at improving early adolescent sleep. Sleep Medicine: X.

Jerath, R., Beveridge, C., Barnes, V.A. (2019) Self-regulation of Breathing as an Adjunctive Treatment of Insomnia. Frontiers in psychiatry, 9, 780. 

Jones, M (2020) The Science of Sleep [Webinar]

Sharman, R. & Illingworth, G. (2020) Adolescent sleep and school performance – the problem of sleepy teenagers.  Current Opinion in Physiology.  15:23-28.

Titova, O.E., Hogenkamp, P.S., Jacobsson, J.A., Feldman, I., Schioth, H.B., Benedict, C. (2015) Associations of self-reported sleep disturbance and duration with academic failure in community-dwelling Swedish adolscents: Sleep and academic performance at school.  Sleep Medicine. 16. 87-93.