Slashdot Mirror
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.
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."
And this pretty much sums up the value of the modern college degree.
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".
Every semester I signed up for 8am classes all week; I worked night shift to pay for school so I showed up awake and ready. It was the classes that started after 11am that killed me.
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.
I had a 7:45am class - differential equations. Never made it to class except to sit exams. I studied the material well enough to pass the class, but it's the only class from which I remember nothing - nothing at all.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Congrats for getting through the weedout class!
Classes like diffeq, dynamics, signals and systems, etc. should never be 8am classes. But they do that on purpose, perfect way to weed people out.
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.
At a party school 11am is to early and 1pm is too late. The idea is to get the piece of paper, not learn anything.
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.
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 had a biology class like that. The night before the final exam, I read the 1,200-page biology textbook in 12 hours. I got a B for that course.
I work at a company. They don't schedule work for my convenience either. My needs are a distance second to the success of the business. Damn them!
I want to post a triple palmface like I can on Disqus.
When I went back to community college to learn computer programming after the dot com bust, taking only the major courses required because I had an A.A. degree in General Education, I made the president's list for maintaining a 4.0 GPA in my major. I was also working 60+ hours as a video game tester and teaching Sunday school at the time. Going back to school as an adult was more fun then when I was younger.
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
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.
I went to West Point - missing a class resulted in disciplinary action. I had one professor that was so bad at teaching (one of my math classes) that I had to use my infinitely valuable free period to sit in ANOTHER professor's identical class to try learning something so I could pass - because failing a course also results in disciplinary action (and dismissal from school).
Part of me is jealous that you got to skate by, and part of me is grateful that schools like yours exist to distinguish schools like mine.
Professors so shitty that you have to go to a second section just to learn the material... yeah, sounds "distinguished" to me
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
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
Yeah, but you get paid by them, not the other way around
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
We are talking about learning in a college environment.
Learning includes things like responsibility, good study/work habits and prioritizing your time. It's not about the success of a business. It's about your success or failure later on in life.
Have gnu, will travel.
Result: Robots needed in ever increasing numbers.
FTFY.
Have gnu, will travel.
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 wonder how the rest of your classmates passed this class.
So what you're saying is that we should push for the one hour work day and the one hour school day? Since we're not working or learning very well the rest of the time.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Sucks to be your. My company do not mind me getting to work at 10am.
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
And this is what student evaluation forms are for (dealing with incompetent teachers, that is).
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
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.
I had a 7:45am class - differential equations. Never made it to class except to sit exams. I studied the material well enough to pass the class, but it's the only class from which I remember nothing - nothing at all.
You remember nothing because it was all hand-waving in thin air.... ;)
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I hate when people have this view on the military. We are not mindless robots, nor are we trained to be. Sure, initial training seems like it, but it's only because at that level you don't necessarily have the whole picture of what needs to happen, what's happening, and how to complete the mission. There are times where you need to follow orders and times where you can question the current plan.
I rank this right there with all military are conservative, racist, violent, or arrogant.
I wake up at 9AM and I'm far from being alert.
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.
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...
You probably got bonus points for being the only student who showed up. I once showed up for an optional final exam - I needed (I think) a B or better on the final to bump my grade from a B to an A. I was the only one who showed up, so when the professor walked in, hands full of exam papers, he looked at me and said, "what the hell, you get an A. Go home."
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
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.
I doubt if your company starts early because that is "best" for worker productivity. It is more likely because of tradition, and to sync with the rest of society. My experience is that the most productive workers are those that come in around noon and work into the evening. The early birds spend the morning drinking coffee and chatting. Then they leave at 5pm when the real work is getting done by the night owls.
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.
Errr.... that sounds like a bad strategy, right there.
I read a study that the IT industry will have a shortage of 1M skilled IT workers in 2030. That's the year when all the baby boomers are supposed to be retired and most foreign workers have gone home. It's also the year when I'll be in my peak earning years of my career. When everyone and their grandparents rushed into healthcare as the new money major, I took computers instead. George W. also signed a $3,000 tax credit for people who want to change their careers. So going back to community college was free. As for my friends who dropped computers to go into healthcare, they make more money than I do but hate their jobs because all they do is wipe ass. Some of my best paying IT contracts were hospitals.
History, read the book, aced the exam, and then immediately forgot half of it in high school and college.
I told a professor once that he wasn't a high school teacher and the students paid to be there so he better start teaching or we would be asking for our money back. He annoyed me with the entire I won't answer questions things.
Yep. Tradition is 90% of scheduling for office work these days.
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
You can't get a B on a final to bump your grade from a B to an A. But I appreciate the store none the less.
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.
Part of me is jealous that you got to skate by, and part of me is grateful that schools like yours exist to distinguish schools like mine.
Wait till they start telling you about all the late nights playing video games and the drunken parties every weekend.
Still, pretty much universities already know what the title says and the early morning classes are the ones that you can show up for, get your syllabus, and have all the reading and homework written down for you to do on the first day of class. Then you can pretty much work on your own as these topics are usually the introductory ones that aren't too hard to learn. If you can sit down with a book and learn from it, you can pass these classes unless the teacher throws in attendance as a requirement (which plenty of them do).
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.
The 'night owls' waste half their day then try to catch up before they leave, all the while claiming how dedicated they are for staying late every day.
Sucks to be your. My company do not mind me getting to work at 10am.
And if someone needs your help at 9:00, I guess they just have to wait. There are good reasons to have everyone work similar hours, although it may be more or less important depending on the nature of the work. I doesn't 'suck' for me, I am perfectly happy with a situation that makes perfect sense. Glad you 'think' you are better off.
Yes, they do. And if someone in different timezone needs my help, they have to wait too. And if I'm on vacation, they have to wait sooo long or find someone else to help them. And if this is really, really nuclear core meltdown situation, I usually have my cell phone nearby, but this happens only as often as never. Otherwise, nobody is gonna die, so it is perfectly fine to wait.
I guess you are not that important.
Yep. Tradition is 90% of scheduling for office work these days.
Maybe because it works.
You're probably just useless, regardless of the time.
Absolutely! I'm putting a lot of effort into this. Indeed, if someone's presence is needed to keep systems running and other people being able to work, it is commonly perceived in the companies I work for as a problem: as many things as possible should be documented and automated. Because you know, shell scripts are much cheaper and reliable than humans, and nobody likes to ruin someone else's vacation.
Well, it might be surprising to you that there are businesses and jobs that require active participation to get things done, where delays result in significant costs. We are not all programmers. Maybe that wouldn't be something that you would be very good at, so you seem to have chosen your field well.
A lot of things WORK, the real question is "is it the best option?"
Sounds like s shithole school to me. Its staff failed to present you the material in a comprehensible and interactive form.
So far, the answer seems to be yes, it is the best option in general. Its not like other approaches have never been tried.
No. Sorry, this does not excuse the school's responsibilities. Think about it this way: If the student had bad study habits and blamed it on the professor, would you agree with him? I doubt it. In this case, the professor had bad teaching habits.
Holding the perpetrators accountable is a big part of "learning how to overcome obstacles, no matter how unfair they may be." Basically, it's a form of standing up for yourself.
Oh, it's everywhere like this. Just some businesses have contingency plans for the people catching cold, and others are betting on this not to happen. You are right, I would feel it really suck to work in the latter ones.
... 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 wonder how the rest of your classmates passed this class.
At one point, I had a D- and was the highest grade in the class.
This teacher - a military officer named "Major Heath" looked and sounded like Major Payne from the movie Major Payne. I have a couple of distinct memories of his class - the first was him writing me up because my shoes weren't sufficiently polished during class one day.
The second: All the cadets in my class (myself included) were at the blackboards working out a problem. He stepped out of the classroom for a few minutes, and we were all stuck on this board problem - none of us could solve it. He came back into the classroom and addressed me:
Major Heath: "Cadet ____, what is the answer?"
Me: "Sir, I do not know the answer."
Major Heath: "Well if you DID know the answer, what would it be?"
But the OP did not participate...
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.
You can't get a B on a final to bump your grade from a B to an A. But I appreciate the store none the less.
You realize that different parts of the syllabus are often weighted differently, right?
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
The value of a college degree is the wage premium employers are willing to pay to those who have a degree over those who don't. If employers stop paying a wage premium to degree holders, then degrees will lose their financial value.
Human Rights, Article 12: Freedom from Interference with Privacy, Family, Home and Correspondence
I see you completely don't get it. Its OK, you don't need to.
Could you let us know where your lawn is, so we can steer clear?
Concur. Starting classes at 11 will improve short-term learning, and complete the destruction (or, as I call it, the millenilization) of long term work ethic. As an employer, here is what I would suggest. I would suggest going to a university and finding out what courses in degree programs most suited to my business do have an 8am lecture. I would then go to that lecture three quarters of the way through that semester and immediately offer a job upon graduation to every person attending it. I wouldn't even care about their scores. Skills can be taught. Self-motivation can't be.
No, no, no, no. It cannot be. Wake up at five in the morning and be there before seven four out of five days a week, then take the late course past ten o clock also, of course. Anyway, couldnt they advise this to some people a few years ago? I ll pretend there is no difference between free hour at eleven and first class on Fridays.