How does sleep affect students’ learning?

Abstract

Sleep plays one of the most important roles in our lives. During sleep the body restores energy spent during the day, puts thoughts and emotions in order, and rests. This article analyzes the influence of such factors as the duration of night sleep, its quality, keeping regular hours and the general state of a teenager during the day on the effectiveness of learning.

The data were collected from an online survey conducted between February 27 and March 14 2022. The study involved 51 students of the 8th grade, school No 1502 “Energy”, Moscow.

The study found that students sleep less than the required hours, go to bed after midnight, do not get enough sleep during the entire school week and try to make up for it on the weekends. On the weekends, they go to bed and wake up much later, so their sleep patterns are disrupted. Almost all students feel tired during the day and many of them feel like sleeping; this, however, has almost no effect on the effectiveness of learning. The most common reasons for going to bed late are doing homework and browsing the Internet.

On average, those with better school performance go to bed earlier, sleep longer, and fall asleep faster than the others. The study showed that the number of A-students who feel tired and want to rest during the day slightly exceeds that of B-students, therefore, the general state during the day does not have a strong effect on academic performance.