Nightly Sleep Is Key to Student Success

For young adults, college is a time of transition. It may be the first time students have the freedom to determine how to spend their time, but this freedom comes with competing interests from academics, social events and even sleep.

A multi-institutional team of researchers conducted the first study to evaluate how the duration of nightly sleep early in the semester affects first year college students’ end-of-semester grade point average (GPA). Using sleep trackers, they found that students on average sleep 6.5 hours a night, but negative outcomes built up when students received less than six hours of sleep a night. 【小题1】

David Creswell, the William S. Dietrich II Professor in Psychology and Neuroscience at the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, led a team of researchers to evaluate the relationship between sleep and GPA.

“Animal studies have shown how critical sleep is for learning and memory,” said Creswell. “【小题2】 The less nightly sleep a first-year college student gets at the beginning of the school term predicts lower GPA at the end of the term. Lack of sleep may be hurting students’ ability to learn in their college classrooms.”

【小题3】 The researchers found that students who receive less than six hours of sleep experienced a pronounced decline in academic performance. In addition, each hour of sleep lost corresponded to (相对应) a 0.07 decrease in end-of-term GPA.

“Once you start dropping below six hours, you are starting to add massive sleep debt that can harm a student’s health and study habits, damaging the whole system,” said Creswell. “【小题4】”

“A popular belief among college students is valuing studying more or partying more over nightly sleep,” said Creswell. “Our work here suggests that there are potentially real costs to reducing your nightly sleep on your ability to learn and achieve in college. There’s real value in budgeting for the importance of nightly sleep.”