To get
A's and B's, you need enough Z's
Study: Lack of sleep makes
learning harder
Friday, November 11, 2005 • BY LAURAN NEERGAARD •
Associated Press
WASHINGTON -- Staying up an hour or two
past bedtime makes it far harder for kids to learn, say
scientists who deprived youngsters of sleep and tested
whether their teachers could tell the difference.
They could.
If parents want their children to thrive
academically, "Getting them to sleep on time is as important
as getting them to school on time," said psychologist Gahan
Fallone, who conducted the research at Brown Medical
School.
The study, unveiled yesterday at an
American Medical Association science writers meeting, was
conducted on healthy children who had no evidence of sleep-
or learning-related disorders.
Difficulty paying attention was among the
problems the sleepy youngsters faced -- raising the question
of whether sleep deprivation could prove even worse for
people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or
ADHD.
Fallone now is studying that question,
and suspects that sleep problems "could hit children with
ADHD as a double whammy."
Sleep experts have long warned that
Americans of all ages don't get enough shut-eye. Sleep is
important for health, bringing a range of benefits that, as
Shakespeare put it, "knits up the raveled sleave of care."
Not getting enough is linked to a host of problems, from car
crashes as drivers doze off to crippled memory and inhibited
creativity.
But exactly how much sleep correlates
with school performance is hard to prove.
So Brown researchers set out to test
whether teachers could detect problems with attention and
learning when children stayed up late -- even if the
teachers had no idea how much sleep their students actually
got.
They recruited 74 6- to 12-year-olds from
Rhode Island and southern Massachusetts for the three-week
study.
For one week, the youngsters went to bed
and woke up at their usual times. They already were fairly
good sleepers, getting nine to 9.5 hours of sleep a
night.
Another week, they were assigned to spend
no fewer than 10 hours in bed a night. And another week,
they were kept up later than usual: First- and
second-graders were in bed no more than eight hours and the
older children no more than 6.5 hours.
In addition to parents' reports, the
youngsters wore motion-detecting wrist monitors to ensure
compliance.
Teachers weren't told how much the
children slept or which week they stayed up late, but rated
the students on a variety of performance measures each
week.
The teachers reported significantly more
academic problems during the week of sleep deprivation, the
study, which will be published in the journal Sleep in
December, concluded.
Students who got eight hours of sleep or
less a night were more forgetful, had the most trouble
learning new lessons, and had the most problems paying
attention, reported Fallone, now at the Forest Institute of
Professional Psychology in Springfield, Mo.
Sleep has long been a concern of
educators.
Consider: Potter-Burns Elementary School
in Pawtucket, R.I., sends notes to parents reminding them to
make sure students get enough sleep before the school's
yearly achievement testing. Principal John Haidemenos
considers it important enough to include in the school's
monthly newsletters, too.
"Definitely there is an impact on
students' performance if they come to school tired," he
said.
But the findings may change physician
practice, said Regina Benjamin, a family physician in Bayou
La Batre, Ala., who reviewed the data at yesterday's AMA
meeting.
"I don't ask about sleep" when evaluating
academically struggling students, she noted. "I'm going to
start."
So how much sleep do kids need?
Recommended amounts range from about 10 to 11 hours a night
for young elementary students to 8.5 hours for
teens.
Fallone insists that his own
second-grader get 10 hours a night, even when it meant
dropping soccer the season that practice didn't start until
7:30 -- too late for her to fit in dinner and time to wind
down before she needed to be snoozing.
"It's tough," he acknowledged. But
"parents must believe in the importance of
sleep."
The study was funded by the National
Institutes of Health.
© 2005 The Star-Ledger. Used by NJ.com with
permission.
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