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New Research Says Starting University Classes at 11am or Later Would Improve Learning (qz.com)
Using a sample of first- and second-year college students at the University of Nevada-Reno in the US and Britain's Open University, a group of researchers analyzed students' cognitive performance throughout the day and found that the best learning happened in classes that began later in the morning. From a report: Since every person's chronotype, or sleep pattern, is slightly different, there isn't one universal start time to benefit everyone -- but according to students' survey responses as well as theoretical data on circadian rhythms parsed by the researchers, starting classes at 11am or later benefits the greatest number of students. The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience this week, bolsters prior research indicating that teenagers learn better with late starts; it also extends the studied age group from high school students to college sophomores and freshmen.
One semester I had a Monday 8am lecture, only lecture for that class.
Never made it to a single one. Never met the professor once. Still passed the course, somehow.
New research says if you let kids sleep through their hangover, it will improve their learning. News at 11.
In true /. style I have not read TFA, but isn't there at least a bit of temporal relativity here? Sleep at midnight and class at 8:00 is very similar to sleep at 3:00 and class at 11:00.
"Morning sex improves University Class learning."
Since every person's chronotype, or sleep pattern, is slightly different
From what I recall of college, no one went to sleep before 2am anyway. (that was when the bars closed) If you went to bed before that you were just going to be woken up by drunks.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
8:30am - Physical Education
9:30am - Morning Announcements & Breakfast
10:00am - Theatre / Public Speaking courses
11:00am onwards - lectures and other academic classes
I believe I would have done wonderfully in such a system.
Survey responses? Yeah late teens and early 20-somethings totally learn better around 11am but preferably 2pm.
One time I took the 7AM class for Harvard Calculus in 1994. If you're not familiar with Harvard Calculus, the textbook was all word problems and no mathematical symbols. I bailed out after the first week.Harvard Calculus never caught on. Thank God.
When I was in university they ran classes from 8:30 am to 10pm, this is partly due to making scheduling easier but also reduces the number of rooms they need.
As an undergrad I had many classes that started at 8 or 9 am. I did okay in them. But when I got to grad school most classes started after noon, as the grad students were teaching the morning classes. My GPA was much higher in grad school because of the later classes. I could stay up late to study and sleep late.
This is dumb and yet another obvious caving to the snowflake generation. The real world doesn't work this way.
"You've never been out of college! You don't know what it's like out there! I've WORKED in the private sector. They expect results." - Dr. Peter Venkman
I want to post a triple palmface like I can on Disqus.
When my earliest class was 9am I'd struggle to wake up at 7:30 and make it there on time.
And when my earliest class was 11am I'd struggle to wake up at 9:30 and make it there on time.
Certainly there's other factors that go into my bedtimes, the levels of outdoor light and various outings, but fundamentally I go to bed based on when I have to wake up.
I don't understand how pushing back start-times causes anything more than a temporary fix until people adapt to the new start-times.
I stole this Sig
This doesn't seem right.
Most sources I could find indicate that the time of the day in which humans experience highest levels of alertness is roughly from 9AM to noon, peaking at 11AM.
Basically, alertness ramps up quickly from the time you wake up until about 9AM. From then on, it continues to rise slowly until it peaks at around 11AM, and then starts going down slightly again until noon. After noon, it dips sharply recovering only after 4PM (this is the worst time during the day to be productive, hence, the reason you have things like Siesta). After 4AM, it remains stable until around 11PM, after which it drops sharply.
So, tl;dr, if you start at 11AM, you start at the peak of alertness, but it is only going downhill from there. You basically have one useful hour of learning until people tune everything out.
This, of course, assuming your circadian cycle isn't busted. Most humans fit this profile.
It's not the time, it's the time awake. In college-aged people especially (late nights, partying, etc) this is a factor. The military has PT every morning to make sure people are awake before work, 30-60 minutes (depending on the exercises done) each morning is enough to wake people up, another 30-60 minutes to shower and eat and you're at 1-2 hours prep time to be fully alert. The issue isn't the time (if you started at 11AM each morning you'd just have 1PM be the new "best time to start" within a month or two.)
My first quarter in college:
8 AM E&M
9 AM Linear Algebra
10 AM Russian
11 AM English
Except for the physics lab one afternoon a week, I was done by noon, and could get my homework completed before the noisy masses returned to the dorm mid-afternoon
Geology - it's not rocket science; it's rock science
For me the main reason why I can't keep a routine going in university (besides my own lack of self-control) is that classes are not offered on a regular schedule to begin with. When I'm stuck with lectures that are only given in the evening and I get home near 10PM, or have to deal with classmates working on a project at the very last minute (i.e. at night) I always end up not getting enough sleep and this obviously affects my concentration in the morning. When I have an internship it takes some adjustment to get a routine going again, but it is much easier to stick with it and soon enough I wake up naturally without dozing through 5 alarms.
I went to 8th grade in the Philippines. There were so many of us they had to stagger the classes, half went to school in the early morning and the other half after lunch.
Going to the afternoon sessions, I felt I was more alert and able to learn more.
In my experience, the best learning (at least for science and engineering) is at night 8pm - 2am. Perhaps the 11am classes are better because it gives the productive night owls a chance to work late into the night without having to show up to an early class half asleep.
I'm sure this varies person to person- I always was able to learn better early in the morning.
Now I'm an adult- I work best in the afternoon/evening (probably because my brain is less active then).
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Is greatest number really a good metric of success though?
These are first and second-year students, 90% of them will drop out by the end of the year. What is the point of increasing a dropouts grade a few points? Perhaps the ones who do better on different schedules are the ones who will actually benefit from doing better in the class.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
My research suggests that starting *anything* after 11:00 AM greatly improves... whatever it is you're starting.
Except coffee. Coffee should be started earlier.
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
"News at 11." - Not sure if that was intentional or not lol! :p
Also learning occurs much better if you show up I've found (and or can stay awake if you do).
My first year of university I had a Math Stats 150 course that started at 8am. The material is pretty dry to begin with, and to top it off the professor would give Farris Bueller a run for his money (Bueller... Bueller....). At any rate my dorm neighbor and I had an agreement if I woke up I would get him up, and vice versa. The end result was that neither of us made the class. Eventually be both dropped the course, and I needed to take it over again (pre-req).
On top of that, one thing I found irritating was that at least at my University the general trend seemed to be that the more sciency the course the earlier the class was, and they more artsy the later it was, which seemed profoundly unfair to me (I don't think I had a single math class that wasn't early). Particularly considering that your probably need to be more on your edge for something as exacting as hard science VS something that is more wishy washy.
...starting a class after 11am increases attendance in the class as well.
Ken
I failed one class in my life, an 8am Freshman Calculus class. Freshman calc, 2nd year calc, differential equations, linear algebra, ... in the afternoon no problem.
My first semester of school THEY made my schedule: M-W-F from 8am to 4pm and Tue-Thur 2:45 to 4:30pm. IT SUCKED!!!
After that semester I tried my best to make schedules that were Monday through Thursday with nothing before 10 am -- and it was so much better.
One of the nice things I noticed, was the scheduling would be a lot different for summer school (probably due to less scheduling, and more rooms available).
As mentioned in an earlier post, at least at the university I attended, there seemed to be a trend that all science courses were in the morning, while the arts would be later in the day... :(
However not so in the summer (probably because the profs didn't even want to), which was a nice change to have an afternoon computer science class. etc...
I passed one of my harder (at least for me) computer science classes in the summer I like to think because it was more relaxed, later in the day, smaller class size, etc...
I took all the early classes I could get. First, I'm an early riser. I hated afternoon classes. But above and beyond this, starting classes in the afternoon almost ensure that no student can hold down a real job while going to school. That would have been a non-starter for me.
They found that colleges and universities prioritize student learning close to the bottom of the list of things they care about.
A few comments from my perspective as a faculty member:
(1) Faculty and staff want to arrive and go home at a reasonable hour. Setting class start times to 11 a.m. will effectively push back the entire academic day by two hours. People don't want to be leaving their offices at 7 p.m. every day.
(2) You can't "compress" the academic day. In other words, you cannot just say "We'll only hold classes from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., instead of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m." You'd need more classrooms (since more classes would be held during the same time slots) and there will be more class conflicts between required courses during the same time slots. Scheduling would be a nightmare.
(3) 9 a.m. really isn't that early. Most students have the luxury of rolling out of bed after 8:30 a.m. and heading to class without a shower, a meal, dealing with family members, or tackling a 30-minute commute. Your average faculty member is probably waking up at 6:30 a.m. to get started on the day. A two hour "sleep-in" period is already built in for college students.
(4) 9 a.m. is actually late by post-graduation standards. Most jobs in the real world start at least an hour earlier. Students might as well get used to it now.
That was my thought process exactly. If class doesn't start until 11a, students can stay up even later than they do now. Then in a few more years, we'll see the inevitable "New Research Says Starting University Classes at 2p or Later Would Improve Learning" headline, and the cycle repeats.
BUT...
So as I was typing this out, it occurred to me that students might also have jobs that keep them up late, and that maybe they wouldn't actually stay up even later if classes moved from 8a to 11a.
LEARN TO BE AN ADULT! Accept the responsibilities that come with being an adult. People go to work from 8-5, 9-5 in most of the industrialized world (save for the few 2nd-3rd shift). These snowflakes need to GROW UP!
I was once the chair of a faculty committee to review a student's appeal of his expulsion for low grades. I asked him, "The next semester is based on the material of the previous semester, which, by your grades, we can assume you did not master. What can you tell us that would make us believe your results in the next semester would be better?" After thinking for a few minutes he said, "I can promise to try to get up before noon."
Let the students schedule their class time, just like they do now. Let early morning risers take their morning classes. Let the bums schedule their afternoon and evening classes.
Why even contemplate changing the start time to a later time?
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
They would accept later shifts delivering pizza.
I once had a grad level quantum mechanics class taught by a prof who I found to be a nice guy, but was quite poor at teaching. The class was at 8 am.
2 semesters later, I had him again for a more advanced QM class. This was at 5 pm. I could hardly believe he was the same teacher. He was good. The problem had been that he was an extreme night owl (as I was) and he just couldn't get woke up enough that early to be coherent.
I later mentioned it to the department chair and he said, "Oh yeah. When we want to punish Kevin, we give him an 8 am class." I retorted that he was punishing us (grad students) far more.
I don't understand why attendance means anything. Of course, in a military school it makes sense, since you are enrolled in the military and you are getting paid. Basically, you're on the clock.
Also, in Labs and practical courses obviously you need to be there to gain experience.
You could see it the other way around. If you get points just for showing up, you don't need to know the material as well. Whereas if your final grade for the course is the written exam and maybe the oral exam; than your mastery of the material is the only thing that counts in your grading
. I've seen students ace difficult maths exams while studying undergrad in Mathematics who never came to class. If you can master material on your own in a course where half the class flunks, you know your stuff, whether you've been going to class or not.
I am pretty sure that they read the data wrong. Many sources have proven that this study should say....
New research shows that no longer catering to the worst whims of millennials and forcing them to grow the fuck up would improve college education.
"Liberalism is a very noble idea, currently controlled by some very bad people. Be sure you do not get the two confused.
students stay up later, which means you need to start classes even later, then they stay up later, all the way back to 8am and then realize you can be a responsible adult and wake up on time and go to bed on time and you dont need to change anything. kids a privileged brats, adults aren't supposed to be.
if the stupid cunts went to bed earlier, it wouldnt be a problem. stop coddling these fucking kids. jesus.
... as he explains in his "The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined" book: https://www.khanacademy.org/ab...
Sal Khan says it won't be right for everyone, but if you are motivated, the "seat time" as a "passive learner" in large lecture courses is mostly wasted time compared to being an "active learner" working through problem sets. He says there that skipping classes was how he and others at MIT were able to take double the normal course load and graduate with high grades and multiple degrees. See:
https://books.google.com/books...
So, in that sense, it might not be surprising or an indictment of college that the GP AC poster was able to miss all the 8am classes for a course and still pass it -- if they did the assignments and otherwise read the text book or other readings and such.
Of course, while class skipping may work for large lecture courses, it may be more problematical for the best sort of small seminar courses where a lot of active participation goes on in class as discussion and is part of the learning process.
So, without knowing the class and what the GP AC did to pass it, it it hard to generalize about college.
That said, you might like these links I put together almost a decade ago on problems with current schooling practices and various alternatives:
"[p2p-research] College Daze links (was Re: : FlossedBk, "Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for Education")"
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net...
"[p2p-research] The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow"
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net...
"[p2p-research] Rebutting Communique from an Absent Future (was Re: Information on student protests)"
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The paper reports that there was a statistically significant difference. It doesn't tell us how big that difference is. It might be tiny and not worth anyone's time or effort. This research only means something when they do a study that reports effect sizes, i.e. How much more students learned when they started classes at 11:00.
I want to embark on an epic rant about how in the real world we get up at 6am and we LIKE IT, but ... eh, as a software engineer, I get up and roll into work when I roll into work, sometimes earlier, sometimes later. Sometimes I'm hacking something out at 1am, etc. My schedule is about as reliable as it was in college, I'd say. So I guess someone else will have to welcome you to the real world.
I knew that 35 years ago. ...
They simply should have asked me
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.