More Info/ Sleep Tips
Sept. 28, 2000-- A study by the National Sleep Foundation today confirms sleepy students don't learn as well and they're in a bad mood. It says they'll do better in school if classes start later in the day.
Granger High School currently offers a program now where students can do just that.
Science Specialist Ed Yeates explains.
For one group of students at Granger High, the school day is only half over by late afternoon. That's because they chose to start classes later in the day.
Teachers and sleep experts have long suspected that teenagers would do better in the classroom if school started later in the day.
Student John McQueen says, "I feel drowsy in first and second period. I wake up about third period."
As we've reported before here on Eyewitness News, scientists know the biologic sleep-wake cycle is different in teens. They tend to go to bed later and awake later in the morning.
The National Sleep Foundation now says if that biologic cycle is interrupted so the teen in most cases gets less than eight-and-a-half hours of sleep, it affects their performance the next day.
Dr. Christopher Jones, of the U of U Sleep Center Studies, explains, "Adolescents respond to a little bit of sleep deprivation with more sleepiness than you and I would at our age."
Preliminary observations made to a symposium of sleep experts by a school district in Minnesota show starting high school later in the day appears to improve student test scores, but even more, their overall behavior.
That doesn't surprise Dr. Jones.
"One of the first things to suffer when you get sleep deprived is your behavior-- tend to be a little more apathetic and more irritable," he says.
Neurologists say more studies are needed to confirm the Minnesota observations. It will take at least another year if not more to see what happens to grade-point averages there.
But Dr. Jones says numerous experiments already show what sleep deprivation does to the brain.
"Sleep deprivation experiments have shown very clearly time and again that memory function is very poor when you're sleep deprived."
While Granger High offers this extended day as an option, don't expect high schools in general across the Wasatch Front to change their schedules any too soon.
Economically, limited busses and working parents are still the driving force to open school doors at the crack of dawn.
The Minnesota Study
In 1997, officials in Edina, Minnesota, decided to start classes at 8:30 instead of 7:20. That year, administrators had fewer referrals for discipline
problems, and the amount of students reporting themselves ill or depressed decreased dramatically.
Students' scores in the
11th and 12th grades were higher that year than ever before, though there was no marked difference in younger students' grades.
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