Students who sacrifice sleep in order to study extra are more likely to perform poorly in a test or quiz, a new study has found.
Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) focused on daily and yearly variations of students who sacrifice sleep to study.
For 14 days in each of the 9th, 10th, and 12th grades, 535 students from several Los Angeles-area high schools reported in diaries how long they studied, how long they slept, and whether or not they experienced two academic problems-they didn’t understand something taught in class or they did poorly on a test, quiz, or homework.
The students represented a mix of socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds.
Although the researchers expected that extra hours of studying that ate into sleep time might create problems in terms of students’ understanding of what they were taught in class, they were surprised to find that diminishing sleep in order to study was actually associated with doing more poorly on a test, quiz, or homework (the opposite of the students’ intent).
“Academic success may depend on finding strategies to avoid having to give up sleep to study, such as maintaining a consistent study schedule across days, using school time as efficiently as possible, and sacrificing time spent on other, less essential activities,” Andrew J Fuligni, one of the researchers said.
“As other studies have found, our results indicated that extra time spent studying cuts into adolescents’ sleep on a daily basis, and it is this reduced sleep that accounts for the increase in academic problems that occurs after days of increased studying,” Fuligni said in a statement.
Fuligni said the study’s findings do not suggest that teens should spend less time studying overall, but that those teens who give up sleep to study more than usual are more likely to have academic problems the following day.
The study was published in the journal Child Development.