Varsity students miss early morning classes, get lower grades even if they attend, finds study

Inadequate sleep impairs attention and memory processes, which may prevent students from reaching their full learning potential, says study published in ‘Nature’.

Representational image | pxhere

New Delhi: Students who sleep well and regularly attend classes are more likely to get good grades, new research has found.

While attending classes increases interactions with instructors and classmates and provides structured time for covering key learning points, sleeping well was also important for optimising cognitive performance and readiness to learn. Inadequate sleep impairs attention and memory processes, which may prevent students from reaching their full learning potential in class, according to the study published in the journal Nature.

The study said lecture attendance was about 10 percentage points lower for classes at 8 am compared with later start times. These students also scored less.

The study noted that during adolescence and early adulthood, environmental and biological factors pushed back bedtime. Therefore, those who went to bed late had to wake up early for morning classes and had shorter nocturnal sleep.

“The combined effects of short sleep and circadian misalignment can lead to daytime sleepiness and impaired cognitive performance. Delaying the start time of high schools has been shown to increase sleep duration and decrease sleepiness by allowing adolescents to sleep in longer,” the study noted.

With the objective to test associations between class start times and attendance, sleep behaviour and academic performance at a large university, the study found that attendance was more in class that started at 10 am than the one which started at 8.

It also said that students missed early morning classes because they were waking up too late to reach on time.

The study advises universities “to adopt practices that improve students’ attendance rates and sleep behaviour to position them to succeed in the classroom and workforce”.

“In conclusion, our study suggests that universities should consider avoiding mandatory early morning classes. Although early classes are often scheduled to maximize use of resources (classroom space and faculty time spent on teaching) and to minimize scheduling conflicts for students and faculty, our results indicate that there may be a trade-off, whereby students are more likely to miss class, get less sleep and obtain a lower grade point average,” it concluded.