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Sleep Deprivation Lowers School Achievement In Children
New submitter josedu writes:"Sleep deprivation is a great, hidden problem that afflicts a great percentage of children in affluent countries. About 73% of 9- and 10-year-old children in the U.S. are sleep deprived, as are 80% of 13- and 14-year-olds. The new study thinks this is linked to the increased access to devices such as mobile phones and laptops late at night. One of the researchers put it very simply: 'Our data show that across countries internationally, on average, children who have more sleep achieve higher in maths, science and reading.' This disruption is also causing schools to dumb-down their instruction to accomodate the reduced capacity of these kids. Thus, even the kids who are getting enough sleep will suffer. The long-term impact of sleep deprivation on nationwide education levels is enormous."
Duh!
They managed to reproduce results fifteen or twenty years, and offer a stupid interpretation. Not bad!
The sleep-deprivation thing is well known, and not new. However, there's nothing tying it to "mobile devices". Rather, there's strong evidence that teenagers tend to have a circadian rhythm which favors being up later and not getting up that early. Schools have historically shoved their schedules extra-early so that extracurricular events like sports can occur before the sun goes down, but after school. Last time I heard about this, a school district had tried simply moving the high school day an hour later, and gotten a very noticable improvement in basically every measure of achievement available to them.
Now that I'm an adult, I sleep until I feel like getting up, and if I'm up a bit late, fine. I pretty much wake up between 11 and noon, and I work "late" most nights... But I get a heck of a lot more done, and a lot better, than I did when I was trying to work 9-5.
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while it might be "duh", government agencies, et al, won't respond to anecdotal stories about the effects of sleep deprivation. They need data to back it.
There are many other "duh" topics, but no one ever bothers to actually study it. And for the ones who do, regular folks aren't surprised at the answer and wonder why the govt. is funding such "obvious" research.
Well, analyzing "duh" data is tedious. And hard to do without preconceived bias.
The beauty of it is that they will grow up to have kids of their own and will do an even sorrier job of raising them than their parents did with them. It's like watching water flow down a drain. Thank God for immigration. Without it the US would be doomed. In particular the oriental immigrants seem to do well due no doubt to actually having a solid family oriented culture. Here in the US most kids seemed to be raised by electronic devices.
When the problem predates the technology (or at least the wide adoption of the technology), it's pretty unlikely that the technology is the primary problem. It may be aggravating things, but the root cause is somewhere else.
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