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Unambiguously Good News about Teens and Sleep
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

You read that right. I mean: it’s really good news about teens and sleep.

We all want adolescents to sleep more. Better said, we know that they need to sleep more.

teens and sleep

More sleep should benefit, say, their mental health, their physical health, and their academic performance.

Heck, they should just feel better.

One Obvious Solution

If teens’ biology prompts them to stay awake later and wake up later (it does), then we could help adolescents sleep more by starting high school later.

Although obvious, that solution has two important flaws:

First: we haven’t tested its efficacy.

Second: teens might just stay up later, and thereby rob themselves of the extra sleep we’re trying to provide. We just don’t know. (See previous paragraph.)

Here’s the first part of unambiguously good news: researchers have now tested the solution.

The city of Seattle, Washington delayed high school start times from 7:50 am to 8:45 am. Researchers measured lots of student behaviors both before and after that change. What did they find?

Teens and Sleep: Obvious Solutions Work!

First: students slept more. They got, on average, 34 minutes of extra sleep: from 6 hours 50 minutes to 7 hours and 24 minutes.

Second: they got higher grades. The average among measured students rose from 77.5% to 82%.

(The researchers hesitate to make strong causal claims; something else might account for the better grades. But, it’s a highly plausible hypothesis that extra sleep helped them learn more.)

Third: at one of the two high schools, first-period absences fell. (At the second, the absence rate remained constant.)

The researchers don’t make a strong argument about the reason for this difference. They do note, however, that the improving school has a higher percentage of economically disadvantaged students. Perhaps the combination of early start times and low SES made on-time arrival especially challenging.

Methodology

Part of the unambiguously good news: this study boasts particularly strong methodology.

In particular, it doesn’t rely on student self-reports — as so many sleep studies do. Instead, it asked students to wear a wrist monitor that tracked their activity levels.

Also, it took both pre- and post-change measurements. That is: they didn’t wait until after the change and then start measuring. Instead, they got a solid baseline, and then compared the after-effects to that baseline.

A final note: this article says that other school districts — and even states — are contemplating similar changes. Here’s hoping they follow through. And, here’s hoping that parents support these changes.

Solving the Nap Research Problem (BTW: Naps Help!)
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

Do naps improve learning?nap research

If you teach teenagers, you almost certainly want to know the answer to that question. Whenever I talk with adolescents about brains, it’s one of the first questions I get.

Alas: an important muddle makes that question noticeably hard to answer.

The Nap Research Problem Explained

On the one hand, we’ve got plenty of research showing that naps boost learning.

If I give you a list of words to study, you’ll remember more of them after a nap than you would if you hadn’t taken that nap.

In one study, for example, Olaf Lahl found that

“An ultra short period of only 6 min of napping is already sufficient to significantly boost declarative memory performance beyond waking control levels.”

You read that right. Even a SIX MINUTE nap helped participants recall more words.

But wait: there’s a problem.

We know that good night-time sleep is essential for consolidation of long-term memories. (Here’s a great article on the subject.)

It seems plausible to me that an afternoon nap might feel good at the time, but might make it harder to sleep at night.

If that’s true, then the short-term benefit of the nap will be more than offset by the long-term detriment of a bad night’s sleep.

In other words: I might remember that list of words better after the nap, but I might be likelier to forget everything else.

This uncertainty has always held me back from recommending naps.

The Nap Research Problem, Solved

Researches in Jintan, China looked at the cognitive results of napping — and their method fixes this research problem.

They gathered nap and night-time sleep data from 363 6th graders. And, they tested them on a variety of cognitive functions: executive control, spatial memory, and complex cognition among them.

What did they find?

First: frequent nappers get better nighttime sleep than infrequent nappers.

Yup: naps didn’t make it harder for these 6th graders to sleep. In fact, they slept better.

Second: frequent nappers did better on a variety of the cognitive tests. For instance, they did better on tests of sustained attention. (In schools, we require A LOT of sustained attention).

They also did better on tests of non-verbal reasoning.

In brief: frequent naps don’t make it harder to sleep at night, and they do improve some cognitive functions. Win win!

Nap Research in Context

This study’s authors wisely note two key limitations.

First, the data on sleep come from self-reports. This method, alas, allows for participants’ faulty memory to skew the results.

Second, the study took place within a particular cultural context. Naps are a cultural norm in China. That norm just might have an influence on the relationship between napping and cognition.

We just don’t know.

(To think more about the important of context, consider the perils of WEIRD neuroscience.)

For me, this study’s specific findings about cognitive capabilities are interesting. However, its general finding that naps don’t interfere with nighttime sleep means that the other studies about naps’ benefits can be taken at face value.

So: you’d like to take a 6 minute nap? GO FOR IT!

Teens and Cell Phones: The Good, The Bad, The (Not So) Ugly
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

Teens and Cell Phones

A recent article in Nature magazine wisely captures the complexities of the Great Cell Phone Debate.

Will they transform human potential?

Will they destroy our children’s self-confidence, not to mention their ability to hold a simple conversation? Their ability to pay attention in class?

(For earlier articles on these topics, see here and here.)

Researcher Candice Odgers offers a simple formula to answer those questions:

“In general, the adolescents who encounter more adversity in their offline lives seem most likely to experience the negative effects of using smartphones and other digital devices.”

That is, the cell phone isn’t causing the problems. For children who already struggle, however, it might exacerbate existing problems.

Teens and Cell Phones: The Good

You might be surprised to read Odgers’s list of digital benefits. Several studies show that teen texting can foster healthy relationships.

6-12 year-olds with solid social relationships are likelier to keep in digital communication with peers as they get older.

Virtual conversations can even help teens “bounce back after social rejection.”

Clearly, cell phones aren’t destroying our children’s ability to create healthy relationships. (Of course, the form those relationships take looks quite different from those of our youths. Or, at least, my youth.)

Teens and Cell Phones: The Bad

As Odgers sees the research, socio-economic status might be a key variable.

The “digital divide” used to mean that rich people had technology that others didn’t. Today, it’s more likely to mean that affluent parents can supervise their children’s digital lives more consistently than less-affluent parents.

“What we’re seeing now is a new kind of digital divide, in which differences in online experiences are amplifying risks among already-vulnerable populations.”

So: for low-income families, online fights lead to real world fights more often. So too bullying.

A Final Point

Complaints about teens and cell phones often miss a crucial point: they get those cell phones from us.

Odgers’s own research shows that 48% of 11-year-olds in North Carolina have cell phones. I’m guessing that relatively few of those 11-year-olds bought those phones — and the data plans — with their own money.

Also: adolescents did not invent the cell phone. They aren’t running companies that make huge profits from their sale.

Odgers’s article suggests that we should focus our concerns not on teens overall, but on those who are already struggling in their daily, non-virtual lives. I suggest, in addition, that we should focus on adult participation in this digital culture.

We are, after all, the ones who make their digital lives possible.

An Extra Half-Hour of Sleep? An Extra Hour?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

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If you’ve ever met a teenager, you might be skeptical about the idea of starting high-school classes later. After all, you might worry that they’ll just stay up later. They are, after all, teenagers…

What does research on high school start time say?

According to a recent study done by Penn State researchers, you needn’t worry. Later high-school start times do in fact translate into more sleep.

Specifically: students whose first class started later than 8:30 got between 27 and 57 (!) more minutes of sleep. Imagine just how much more learning might happen if a teen regularly got an extra hour of sleep.

The researchers based these conclusions on sleep diaries that lasted only a week; I’d be more persuaded if they had data from a longer period of time.

However, this finding does echo a conclusion that I reported on back in April. Given these converging data–and, frankly, common sense–I’m inclined to believe that later start times really do help students get more sleep.

Parents, High School Start Times, and Sleepy Teens
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

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Research findings that support later high-school start times have been more and more common in recent years. (See also here.) And teachers I know are increasingly vocal about letting teens sleep later.

And yet, when I talk with high school leaders, they ruefully cite sports schedules to explain the impossibility of making serious changes.

(I’ve also read that bus schedules get in the way.)

Here’s another–quite surprising–reason that this change might be hard to accomplish: parental uncertainty. According to this recent study, published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, half of parents whose teens start school before 8:30 don’t support a later start time.

The study concludes that we need to do a better job educating parents about the biological changes in adolescent sleep patterns.

The more that parents understand how melatonin onset–and, hence, sleepiness–changes with adolescence, the more they might understand that their awake-at-midnight teens aren’t simply being willful. They are instead responding to powerful chemical signals.

Given all we know about adolescent sleep, and the effect of sleep on learning, teachers and parents should be champions of reasonable high school start times.

The Evidence Mounts: Delaying Middle and High School Start Times
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

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Here’s the statement from the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine:

During adolescence, internal circadian rhythms and biological sleep drive change to result in later sleep and wake times. As a result of these changes, early middle school and high school start times curtail sleep, hamper a student’s preparedness to learn, negatively impact physical and mental health, and impair driving safety. Furthermore, a growing body of evidence shows that delaying school start times positively impacts student achievement, health, and safety. Public awareness of the hazards of early school start times and the benefits of later start times are largely unappreciated. As a result, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine is calling on communities, school boards, and educational institutions to implement start times of 8:30 AM or later for middle schools and high schools to ensure that every student arrives at school healthy, awake, alert, and ready to learn.

Of course, schools have many reasons not to make this change: bus schedules, sports schedules, parent schedules, perhaps lunar eclipse schedules.

But in the face of the mounting evidence, all these reasons sound like excuses. Schools exist to help students learn; at many schools, our daily schedule inhibits their learning. We can, and should, solve this problem.

[h/t Brad Choyt, Crossroads Academy]

Does Internet Use “Rewire Adolescent Brains”?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

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Our very own Kathryn Mills says: we’ve got a lot of anecdotes, but not a lot of evidence, suggesting that internet use is meaningfully changing — much less damaging — adolescent brains.

For example: one study that Mills cites tracks 908 adolescents for 2 years, and finds no meaningful correlation between an increase in World Wide Web surfing and a reduction in free time physical activity. In other words: the couch potato stereotype might exist more on TV drama than in reality.

In brief: although our teacherly instincts might warn us that the Web has drastically  changed adolescent cognitive or social abilities, researchers haven’t yet found much evidence to confirm these fears.

To see Kathryn’s earlier articles for this blog, click here.