Research Question: Do study habits that affect sleep levels influence test scores of City College students?

Group Members: Zainab Baig, Katie Johnson, Viktoriya Markova, Rebecca Regine

Citations:

Estes, Thomas H., and Herbert C. Richards. “Habits of Study and Test Performance.” Journal of Reading Behavior, vol. 17, no. 1, 1985, pp. 1–13., doi:10.1080/10862968509547527.

• Thomas H. Estes has contributed to several other research experiments that are published in the Journal of Reading Behavior. He is professor emeritus of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia. Currently, he serves as president of Dynamic Literacy, a company specializing in vocabulary development products based in Latin and Greek underpinnings of academic English. He received his PhD in reading education from Syracuse University. Dr. Estes taught in the McGuffey Reading Center of the Curry School and in the Curriculum, Learning, and Teaching program for 31 years. There is no much information on Herbert C. Richards besides the fact that he associated with the University of Virginia and has conducted several other similar studies on learning and how it affects different categories of students. The study examined three different aspects including how test performance is related to inquisitiveness, compulsivity related to test performance of individual students compared to all the others, and the relation between distractibility and test performance. The study was administered to 418 college students and 124 seventh and tenth graders. The students were asked several questions and required to answer how often they experienced the exemplified situation. The resulted stated that test performance was monotonically related to study behavior. The inquisitiveness factor, the desire for knowledge, played a major role in academic performance. However, the researchers state that there are external factors that could have affected the academic performance. There seems to remain some relationship between the three factors tested, compulsivity, inquisitiveness, and distractibility, on test performance, but the factors are limiting and allow for ambiguity.

Flueckiger, L., Lieb, R., Meyer, A. H., & Mata, J. (2014). How Health Behaviors Relate to Academic Performance via Affect: An Intensive Longitudinal Study. Plos ONE, 9(10), 1-10. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0111080

• The study follows 72 first year undergraduate students for a period of 32 consecutive days to examine how sleep and physical activity relate to their academic performance during an examination period. The students answered online questionnaires on their sleep quality, physical activity, learning goal achievement, and examination grades. The study found that, while physical activity had no effect on learning goal achievement and examination grades, better sleep quality predicted better learning goal achievement. This study supports our prediction that there is a relationship between sleep and academic achievement.

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.

• The study is conducted by Cari Gillen-O’Neel from the Department of Psychology at the University of Los Angeles. She is currently working at the University of Macalester as an assistant professor in developmental psychology. O’Neel examines the social and educational implications of children’s identities, in relation to demographic and institutional groups. She has conducted several research studies relating to child development and how children are affected by others in institutional settings. In the study, “To Study or to Sleep? The Academic Costs of Extra Studying at the Expense of Sleep,” O’Neel and several other members of her research team constructed an experiment to observe the association between sleep time and academic performance. There were 535 participants in the study, which consisted of students from 9th, 10th, and 12th grade. For 14 days, they required the students to compose journal entries stating the amount of hours he or she slept, study habits, and sleep schedule. They continued to monitor the students throughout the preceding grade levels and realized how students continued to sacrifice sleep for study time. This habit increased throughout the grade levels causing students to continuously struggle with academic problems in the classroom.

Howard, J. (2014, June 22). Scientists Link A Good Night’s Sleep To Higher Test Scores. Huffington Post. Retrieved October 3, 2017, from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/22/sleep-hours-exam-performance_n_5516643.html

• Researchers from Ghent and KU Leuven Universities, located in Belgium, conducted a study to examine students and their sleep habits during stressful exam times. This study is a credible source because it is conducted within a university, ensuring academic integrity. They surveyed exactly 621 first-year students and concluded that students that had overall more hours of sleep performed better on their exams. For example, students that slept for seven hours in a night had a 10% higher exam score than those students that got less hours of sleep. One of the researchers, Dr. Baert, concluded that “new knowledge is integrated into our existing knowledge base while we sleep” and this is essentially why more hours of sleep leads to higher test scores. -Zainab

Kerdijk, W., Cohen-Schotanus, J., Mulder, B. F., Muntinghe, F. H., & Tio, R. A. (2015). Cumulative versus end-of-course assessment: effects on self-study time and test performance. Medical Education, 49(7), 709-716

• In this article, researchers investigated whether the study habits of students would differ if they were given one final exam or three cumulative tests throughout the semester. Many college students wait until the week of the test to begin studying and sometimes study only the day before. This study encouraged students in the cumulative testing group to practice spaced out studying as they were being tested on the same material multiple times. At the end of each week, each student had to report how many hours they spent studying class material. The researchers found that the students in the cumulative testing group studied significantly more than the individuals who only had a final exam. The participants in the group with one exam studied seven more hours on the week of the final exam. However, there were no significant test score differences overall between the groups. This is important to our study because these two groups used different methods of studying and there was no difference between their scores. This shows that we may find that people who lose sleep by cramming may have the same test scores as people who space out their studying and have a good night’s rest before an exam.

McCall, W. (2004, January 21). Study: More Sleep, Sharper Brain. ABCNews. Retrieved October 3, 2017, from abcnews.go.com

• This article is a credible source because it is presented through the means of a well-known news source, ensuring that the information given is accurate. The study that is discussed in this article is also referring to a German study at the University of Luebeck. Researchers concluded that participants that got eight hours of sleep were three times more likely to solve a hidden solution to a math problem than participants who were sleep deprived. Jan Born, the researcher that led the study, concluded that the findings of this study “support biochemical studies of the brain that indicate memories are restructured before they are stored.” This coincides with our research proposal and confirms that more hours of sleep aids the brain in storing and processing information, which in turn, results in higher  test scores among students that got more sleep than students that are sleep deprived. -Zainab

Patrick, Y., Lee, A., Raha, O., Pillai, K., Gupta, S., Sethi, S., & Moss, J. (2017). Effects of sleep deprivation on cognitive and physical performance in university students. Sleep & Biological Rhythms, 15(3), 217-225.

• Researchers conducted a study consisting of 557 psychology students to determine the relationship between sleep quality and academic performance. Each student took a demographic survey, the Goldberg Depression Inventory and lastly, the Pittsburg Sleep Quality Index. The investigators screened out students who were depressed or displayed many depressive symptoms and so only 468 subjects remained. With the scores, the investigators analyzed the data using statistical analyses. The researchers found that there was a correlation between low scores of sleep quality and a student’s’ GPA. This is important to our research study because many college students are chronically sleep deprived as they stay up late to study or complete assignments. Although this study addressed a student’s overall GPA, it is possible that students who get less sleep the night before an exam will do worse than those who get a reasonable amount.

Thacher, P. V. (2008). University Students and the “All Nighter”: Correlates and Patterns of Students’ Engagement in a Single Night of Total Sleep Deprivation. Behavioral Sleep Medicine, 6(1), 16-31. doi:10.1080/15402000701796114

• One of the most common methods of studying for students both in college and in high school is staying awake the night before and studying the entire time. This method of pulling an all nighter and cramming was examined in this study. 120 undergraduate students self-reported their sleeping patterns and whether or not they engage in one or more single nights of total sleep deprivation (SN-TSD). The researchers examined these factors, as well as the student’s’ GPA which they obtained from the university registrar. They found that engaging in a SN-TSD resulted in later sleep times overall as well as poorer academic achievement as indicated by GPA. This supports the notion that study habits that affect sleep levels influence academic achievement, which ties into our research question.