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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!
So at some point before graduate school it turns the other way around...
I'd wager ambient urban noise levels have increased tremendously over the last while as well. Given increasingly shoddy construction, antisocial behaviour from the party set and general vehicular activity you'd have to be living in a rural area to get a decent night's sleep in most places. It's a very serious business with major health implications for children and adults.
Did you even read the summary? Kids are getting dumber because of social/cultural/technological/material reasons. The schools are getting dumber to accommodate the kids who are getting dumber, and the problem is a downward self-propagating spiral.
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.
I may seem like a fuddy-duddy to some other parents with the ~somewhat~ early (or at least not late) bedtimes we have established for our grade school aged kids during the week, but the further I go, the more I believe we're doing the right thing. I may not be able to control whether they get sick or not, or if they always eat all their veggies, but the one thing I CAN make sure of is that they always get a good night's sleep. And the older they get, the more important the benefits of being well rested are, considering the increasing academic rigor that comes with the higher grades. Considering how sleep deprived most kids are, they'll be Well Rested Supermen by the time they arrive at high school.
And I've already tried to instill in them that all-nighters to cram for an exam are, without a doubt, absolutely counter-productive. Been there, done that - fell asleep during a Physics final. Staying up all night to try and learn a semester's worth of material simply doesn't work. If you haven't done the work all along and don't know the material before the final arrives, adding a serious level of fatigue won't help.
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...kids, is that many parents don't put their kids to sleep the same way they did when I was a child (70's/80's.)
My kids go to sleep between 7:30PM and 8:30PM depending upon their ages (ranging from 5-9.)
At 9PM at night during the week I'll hear quite a lot of our neighbors' kids still playing outside, much less getting ready for bed.
School starts VERY early here as well (kids have to be at school by 7:30AM.)
Now, some of these kids who are staying up later are doing quite well in school, so who knows. It's just different from when I was a kid and it seemed to be a pervasive adult conspiracy to put all children to bed early...
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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.
It's easy to blame computers and cell phones, how about not giving out 5+ hours of homework a night? To make it worse most of it was busy work in addition to the nightly reading assignments. When you have 6+ classes per day with reading and assignments, that stuff adds up pretty quickly. In high school, I was lucky to get 4 hours a night.
Even my heaviest college semesters weren't anywhere near as busy as my average high school week.
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..."sleep deprivation lowers all achievement in everyone"?
Who's surprised?
(Mind you, I'm all for conducting experiments to test things we all "know". I just don't usually expect to see those experiments classified as newsworthy.)
...kids, is that many parents don't put their kids to sleep the same way they did when I was a child (70's/80's.)
My kids go to sleep between 7:30PM and 8:30PM depending upon their ages (ranging from 5-9.)
At 9PM at night during the week I'll hear quite a lot of our neighbors' kids still playing outside, much less getting ready for bed.
School starts VERY early here as well (kids have to be at school by 7:30AM.)
Now, some of these kids who are staying up later are doing quite well in school, so who knows. It's just different from when I was a kid and it seemed to be a pervasive adult conspiracy to put all children to bed early...
My parents made me go to bed at 7:30 till I was in middle school. It was evil. I didn't need that much sleep, and the sun was still shining most the time. It would take me hours to fall asleep. If that help my grades, I don't know. I was the kid who always had the "can't pay attention" in class. But later, in middle school and beyond, when I wasn't going to bed at 7:30 (it was then more 9-10ish) I got B+ grades without trying.
Be seeing you...
The book 'the end of homework' explained this pretty well. Research has found that school starts an hour before children are typically awake. School starts so early so that there can be long afternoons of sports practice. Prioritizing learning over sports would thus lead to improved learning.
I recall Junior year of high school. Biology and Geometry were my first two classes, and I would fall asleep during the latter due to late nights exploring the nascent Interweb. Late at night there are no parents nagging you, you can go to sleep whenever you want, it's quiet and you can think or do whatever you want. And, ya know, less sleep means more free time, of which high schoolers feel quickly slipping away as their homework load increases.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Actually I read once that teenagers are better "profiled" to perform during the mid day and hence they should really be sleeping much later at night and into the early morning, class for teenagers should be starting at noon not 9am. Well I'm not going to argue a good night sleep is important, it is very important, we need to be setting class times that revolve more around the natural clock of the body and not what works best for the adults. If science can show that 12 - 7pm works better for teenagers then I think we should move class times to work in that area. It would also be worth figuring out when the best natural class time is children, I have a problem when we base sleep patterns for the teachers rather then the students.
This link from the BBC talks about it: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7932950.stm
So I think the solution, at least for teenagers is to move the class time back so they can best perform when biologically they're ready to.
Common sense would tell anyone that it is parents fault for allowing their children to stay up all hours of the night. Simply confiscate all electronic devices at bedtime. It is the parents responsibility to raise their children, not the state.
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
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.
So each generation has been getting worse, and this has been going on since at least the days of Ancient Greece.
I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words... When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly disrespectful and impatient of restraint.
-- Hesiod, 8th century BC
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.
"Oriental"? Is this the 19th century?
More pointedly, you have to love those positive stereotypes. Presumably you realize that every positive stereotype is just a counterpoint to a negative stereotype. Forget the stereotyping of native born Americans. People who would cringe at the mere hint of a negative stereotype of any other nation will happily embrace the most negative stereotypes of Americans, and parrot that the only virtuous people left in America are immigrants (which kind of makes you wonder why virtuous family oriented immigrants stay here). So, given that native born Americans are trash, what about the non-"Oriental" immigrants? Do Hispanic immigrants, for example, not have a solid family oriented culture?
Many of the houses which were cheaply tossed up during the housing boom have incredibly poor sound dampening. The house I am in now was built in 2009 and doesn't even come close to my old 1971 block construction home. "I wish I had a house that wasn't built as quickly and cheaply as possible." - said the millions of buyers who realized that newer != better. Would you rather have antique solid wood furniture or a brand new!!! set from Ikea?
Would love to see the sleep deprivation stats on college students...
And medical students and residents.
No, medical residents are super-human creatures. As such it's perfectly reasonable to have them perform surgery after not having slept for two days, while mere humans should get at least 8 hours of sleep before attending math class.