Class before 9 am is harmful for sleep and performance – 03/12/2023 – Equilibrium

Could going to university too early harm students’ academic performance and attendance?

Research has evaluated the relationship between the start time of classes and student attendance and found a result that many may find familiar: those that start before 9 am disrupt student sleep and lead to lower school attendance compared to those that start later. .

At work, the scientists analyzed classes from 8am to 4pm and found that attendance was about 10% lower in the morning courses. In addition, the proportion of students who woke up after the start of the class when it started at 8:00 am –which led them to lose time and not be able to keep up with the content– also impaired the absorption of learning.

The study, published last month in the journal Nature Human Behavior (of the Nature group) and conducted by researchers at the Duke-NUS School of Medicine and the Institute for Applied Sciences of Learning and Technological Education at the National University of Singapore, both in Singapore, reinforces that demanding attendance at classes that start very early should be avoided at universities, since there is a relationship with worse academic performance.

To assess the link between school start time and students’ sleep quality, the researchers ran three experiments. The first measured the presence of more than 23,000 students who participated in 337 courses using Wi-Fi access on a university campus.

The frequency of connections was approximately 10% lower when classes started at 8 am compared to courses starting at 9 am. The scientists claim that Wi-Fi access and frequency are directly associated in almost 100% of cases (0.98, with a 95% confidence interval).

Next, the scientists assessed whether students were attending classes less because they were sleeping. For this, they evaluated 181 students with sleep and activity assessment devices for six weeks. As a result, nearly a third slept past the start of classes when they started at 8am, and nearly half couldn’t wake up in time to get to their course.

Finally, the relationship with day and night sleep (in terms of duration) was made. The scientists found that a greater number of early-start classes led to a higher frequency of naps during the course and that the average daily amount of sleep at night was about 17% less in students who started before 9:00 am compared to those who started classes at night. noon classes.

For the biologist and professor of evolutionary genomics at UFMG (Federal University of Minas Gerais) and visiting professor at the State University of Michigan (USA), Luiz Eduardo Del-Bem, who did not participate in the study, the article brings some important observations that may help understand the evolution of human learning.

“The human brain has different dynamics of wakefulness and sleep in children, adolescents and adults. While adults can sleep less hours and still manage to perform at a high level, we know that in adolescents and young people it does not work like that”, he says, adding that the research shows the cumulative effect of lack of sleep on academic performance.

Although statistically the students’ grades did not present significant changes in relation to the class schedule, the absorption of the content was worse when they started at 8 am. “We who are teachers know that many times the student is even there in person in class before 9 am but is sleeping. So this learning is lost”, she says.

In a survey conducted with high schools in Fortaleza, Pedro Burin and his master’s student Felipe Rocha Alves, from the Faculty of Medicine of the UFC (Federal University of Ceará), evaluated that classes in the morning had an incidence of 48% of excessive sleepiness daytime in students compared to afternoon, also affecting the learning and development of young people.

For Del-Bem, these and other studies show that there is an effect that has yet to be measured on the well-being and learning that children and adolescents lose when submitted to courses at these times. “How much intellectual development did we lose that could be produced because we forced young people to take classes too early and they had worse learning”, she concludes.