To Study or to Sleep? The Academic Costs of Extra Studying at the Expense of Sleep

By:Cari Gillen-O’Neel, Virginia W. Huynh, Andrew J. Fuligni

Summary: The study was conducted by several individuals from California State University and examined students’ sleep schedule versus amount of time dedicated to studying versus the academic issues that followed either the following day or during an examination. The study involves students from three different high schools in the California area ranging across all three economic backgrounds. There were 535 participants that spanned 9th,10th, and 12th grade; it was unclear why students from the 11th grade were not recorded. The students were monitored for two weeks as they continued their education from grade to grade. They were given daily checklists that noted and documented the amount of sleep each student had, academic problems each incurred in class the following day, and the amount of time each studied for class. It was examined that students increasingly had more academic problems as they progressed through high school. As a result, the students gradually got less amount of sleep as they increased their studying time. However, the less amount of sleep did cause more academic problems for students the following day and in future examinations. The study was quite ambiguous about the type of academic problems that the students incurred and due to the population and specific location that the study was conducted in there was a lot of bias.

Citation: Gillen-O’Neel, C., Huynh, V. W. and Fuligni, A. J. (2013), To Study or to Sleep? The Academic Costs of Extra Studying at the Expense of Sleep. Child Development, 84: 133–142. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2012.01834.x