Trade Off Between Sleep and Grades

A typical teenager requires exactly nine hours and fifteen minutes of sleep, but a 2007 study revealed that approximately only eight percent of high school students receive enough sleep on an average school night.

This study, which appeared online in the “Journal of Adolescent Health,” is based off of a national Youth Risk Behavior Survey conducted on 12,000 students in grades 9 through 12.

According to Nationwide Children’s Hospital, the average amount of sleep that teenagers get is between seven hours and seven hours and fifteen minutes.

As students advance through high school, it becomes more and more difficult to attain an adequate amount of sleep. The time-consuming responsibilities they have range from family obligations and club activities to achieving satisfactory grades.

“It’s always either family, grades, clubs or sleep; I can pick three of them, but not all of them,” junior Larson Chang said. “During weekdays, school takes up the morning half of my day, clubs take up the afternoon, [and] homework takes up the night. On the weekends, sleep replaces school and family replaces clubs, but it’s hard to feel refreshed when you only get a good dose of sleep two times a week.”

A common problem many students face is the trade-off between sleep and grades. Achieving good grades requires the investment of study time, even if it is at the expense of sleep. However, recent research conducted by the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) has proven that this process is counterproductive.

This study was conducted by UCLA professor of psychiatry Andrew J. Fuligni, UCLA graduate student Cari Gillen-O’Neel and several other colleagues and published in the recent online edition of “Child Development.”

The study involved the recruitment of 535 Latino, Asian American and European American students in the ninth, tenth and twelfth grades from three Los Angeles area high schools. The students were asked to keep a fourteen-day period diary that recorded how long they studied, the amount of sleep they received and if they faced one of the two academic problems: not understanding something taught in class the following day or low performance on a test or quiz.

Researchers who studied the results found an increasing association between study time and academic problems, because longer hours spent studying lessened the amount of time spent sleeping.

Sleep deprivation is also associated with more severe consequences among adults and teenagers alike. Teenagers who do not receive enough sleep are not only impacted in academic performance, but also in terms of mood, behavior, cognitive ability and driving.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, drowsiness and fatigue are common causes of more than 100,000 traffic accidents yearly— more than half of which are caused by adolescent drivers.

Teenagers, however, can improve the average amount of sleep they get nightly through several changes. The National Sleep Foundation suggests that students maintain a regular sleep schedule even on the weekends, taking afternoon naps, turning off electronic distractions to avoid brain stimulation and avoiding caffeine, alcohol and drugs.

“Time management is an important thing, so don’t jam everything together in the end,” school nurse Anita Man said.

In addition, Man also suggests that students get adequate rest, nutrition, hygiene, exercise and relaxation.