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Poor Grades Tied To Class Times That Don't Match Our Biological Clocks (berkeley.edu)
An anonymous reader shares a report: It may be time to tailor students' class schedules to their natural biological rhythms, according to a new study from UC Berkeley and Northeastern Illinois University. Researchers tracked the personal daily online activity profiles of nearly 15,000 college students as they logged into campus servers. After sorting the students into "night owls," "daytime finches" and "morning larks" -- based on their activities on days they were not in class -- researchers compared their class times to their academic outcomes. Their findings, published today in the journal Scientific Reports, show that students whose circadian rhythms were out of sync with their class schedules -- say, night owls taking early morning courses -- received lower grades due to "social jet lag," a condition in which peak alertness times are at odds with work, school or other demands. "We found that the majority of students were being jet-lagged by their class times, which correlated very strongly with decreased academic performance," said study co-lead author Benjamin Smarr, a postdoctoral fellow who studies circadian rhythm disruptions in the lab of UC Berkeley psychology professor Lance Kriegsfeld.
Life isn't always about getting the schedule or job you want. Sometimes you have to suck it up and do what you need to do and stop whining about why you fail.
Huh ... so maybe rounding kids up like cattle and packing them into big buildings and trying to educate them like cattle has other dangers then just making them big targets.
Or are these findings just applicable to college age?
So we tailor their class times to their biological rhythms and they turn into adults with juvenile biological rhythms. Will they ever really grow up?
Our ancestors worked a few hours a day hunting game and then went back to doing nothing. Pretty much like most predators in the wild.
The main difference is that we today have a LOT more to spend our time and money on so we have to work more to get that shit paid. But if you consider what you really need, you'll notice that working just a few hours a day is plenty.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Well, my first reaction (as many others I'm sure) was that sometimes work doesn't align with your sleep cycle either so suck it up.
But then much of the method in school (especially now) doesn't align with the real world, and school isn't supposed to be analogous to a work environment. I always felt like I was more with it in my afternoon classes going through school, and that has continued on in my work life. Luckily I now have a job with flex hours where I can roll in at 10pm and work till 7pm, covering what seems to be my hard wired peak window of useful brain time.
That said, what can you do. There's plenty of people who are at their best in the morning, and school logistics are complicated enough I'm sure. Switching to online learning sounds great in theory, but I genuinely believe a big part of school is the social aspect. Looking back I probably would have loved to not have to physically go to school, but the social experience probably did shape me for the better.
People today would not be able to cope with what they had to.
So what? I don't think my grandfather, who had the same job his entire adult life, expected dinner to be on the table when he got home, and frequently relied on violence as an educational tool would thrive in today's world either. The only thing that doesn't seem to change is people who repeat ad nauseam that things were better in the past.
Society is evolving. For the most part, men no longer drag women by their hair to fuck them next to piles of animal bones in cold, humid caves, and I don't think we lost of lot as a species as we moved past that. Today, with some exceptions, every person has a chance to make a meaningful contribution to society, and this is a good thing if we're at a point where people think about biological clocks to optimize productivity and happiness, instead of "toughing it out" and sticking with rigid systems.
Yes, there are idiotic aspects in today's life that may be mistakenly perceived as "evolution" (such as sexist and racist hiring policies at Google under the guise of "diversity"), but challenging the practice of having rigid schedules is not one of them. It's about time that we start considering better options than 9 to 5 for everyone, and next time you're stuck in traffic at rush hour you'll probably agree.
lucm, indeed.
Similar to the other reply. I'm a STEM major. For many of my classes at the local CC (I'm transferring this fall), there was one slot any given semester, and often the same slot every semester. In my case, this is a complication more because I also work full time; I've been lucky enough to juggle my hours at work (I'm salaried), but others might not be. This kind of thing is especially true for low-enrollment-but-necessary classes with labs (like modern physics or more advanced engineering classes). I mean, I'm definitely the kind of person who prefers to sleep in until 9-10, but I've been getting up between 6 and 7 for work for 20 years now. I can do it, but I'm not going to pretend my performance in the early morning is the same as what it is by noon or in the afternoon.
While a bit groggy in my first period classes, I was always wide awake by my second class.
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My point in writing this is there are more important measures to address than morning class times if we want to improve a student's scholastic success rate.
That's like saying: "I would need to lose maybe 10 pounds, and this qualifies me to decide that morbidly obese people should just stop eating junk food and get in shape instead of bitching about hormones and requesting bypass surgery."
lucm, indeed.
The main difference is that we today have a LOT more to spend our time and money on so we have to work more to get that shit paid.
False. While most things have rose at the rate of inflation, prices for entertainment have dropped substantially in the past 20 years. While a 55" tv would have cost $3,000+ just twenty years ago, they can now be bought for $300. Camcorders, cameras, tape/cd players have all been replaced by relatively inexpensive smartphones. Film and tapes for cameras and camcorders have been replaced by cheap memory cards and free unlimited online storage you can access anywhere from your phone. DVD and vcrs have been replaced by smart tvs with Netflix, Hulu and YouTube. 20 years ago you might spend thousands on a reasonable music and movie collection, that has been replaced by spending a few dollars a month on Netflix and Amazon streaming, Apple Music and Spotify.
Thanks to advances in vehicle reliability people are even keeping cars longer, an average of 11.5 years https://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/2...
So really this is the richest the average American has ever been.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
When your argument begins with a cartoon, expect your arguments to be treated as cartoonish.
Our ancestors (most of them) worked all day from before the sun rose to after it set just to survive, farming, gathering, hunting, whatever it took.
Our ancestors worked a few hours a day hunting game and then went back to doing nothing.
You're both right. It depends on which ancestors you are looking at. 300 years ago AC is correct. 3000 years ago Opportunist is correct. It depends which ancestors you're looking at. I imagine 3000 years ago, it probably depended on the season a lot too. In winter you probably had to work a lot harder to get you daily calories than you had to in late Spring.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
So we tailor their class times to their biological rhythms and they turn into adults with juvenile biological rhythms. Will they ever really grow up?
It doesn't matter. What matters is whether it is more effective to provide more off-shift jobs. We have TRILLIONS of dollars in capital that go unused at night, when people go home. If 10% of labor is also more effective at later hours, that's worth exploring.
Real lawyers write in C++
Night owls don't stay up late and wake up late because they like to party and are lazy to wake up in the morning. Researchers have found that not everyone's biological clock runs at exactly 24 hours. Those whose clock runs slower (say 25 hours) are night owls - they tend to still be alert after the earth's rotation says they should've gone to sleep, and likewise tend to wake up later because their biological clock put them to sleep later. Those whose clock runs faster (say 23 hours) are morning larks - they tend to wake up earlier because their biological clock put them to sleep more quickly, and likewise they tend to fall asleep earlier in the night.
BTW, studies have shown people's average biological clock (when deprived of reference to day/night cycles) is 24.2 hours to 25 hours. So it's actually the night owls who are normal, and the morning larks who are abnormal.
I don't think so. PBS did a things years back where they took a group of people and made them "settlers". They gave them a typical amount of money for the general store. Their job was to during the summer create what was necessary to make it thru the winter, by chopping wood, growing corn etc. The findings were not good. Every single family would have froze to death. Some would have made it a couple of months, which was not even close to the resources needed. One creative rich family who was disqualified even snuck out and bought stuff on the outside. They were indignant of course saying that they were just thinking outside the box. Life was significantly harder in the old days. Just look at lifespans.
I'm not sure it's the role of a 'responsible adult' to conform, or to force others to conform, to a system that only suits a proportion of the population.
If anything the role of a responsible adult would be to change the system, or at the very least allow changes to the system without having to be browbeaten into it, to ensure it suits everybody.
It has long been known that there's a biological basis between groups' waking and sleeping times. Back in the dawn of time this would have been a good thing, as it would have provided round the clock security for your tribe. In the modern world it's similarly a boon as it enables shift workers to work at times that suit them - though I'm not sure we truly benefit from this as much as we could be.
But, for some reason, when it comes to education we find people turning all authoritarian, saying "suck it up buttercup", and accusing those who genuinely find early morning lectures a struggle of being snowflakes. While I have found educational psychology to be fascinating I must confess I find ex-students' (i.e. most of us adults') attitudes towards education equally interesting. What stories do they tell about our experiences when we were students.
For all that you mean well, respectfully, your advice is actually part of the problem, because you're not seeing the real problem. The problem for those 'people out of time' is the system, not themselves and those who, for whatever (likely mostly subconscious) reasons strive so hard against anyone changing that system. You're trying to fix the wrong thing!
We know that farming is highly inefficient on resources. An estimated 95% of people died from starvation or injury in the transition from the mesolithic to the neolithic, due to the fact that you have to work a lot harder with a much higher risk of getting nothing. That is why larger communities developed. Even though individuals and families had a low probability of surviving, a village had much better odds. It required a leader and distribution of what was produced, but it worked.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Also false. Americans were richer in the 70s. Wealth isn't about big TVs, it's about stability Yes, I can buy a nice TV for $200. But a house is $300,000+ unless I want to live in a slum and drink lead. Health care and education costs have massively outpaced inflation. Food has shot up too in the last 10 years thanks to deregulating the commodities market. Real Buying power is down. Way down.
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