Sacrificing sleep for studying does not help, but can end up with the opposite outcome. Children who sacrifice sleep to study are more likely to face academic problems later, researchers warn.
Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) included 535 students from various Los Angeles area schools to examine the concept of giving up sleep for studying. Participants studying in 9th, 10th and 12th grades were asked to record their study details in a diary. All the children shared the total time they spent on their studies, sleeping, and having any academic problems - ability to follow the teacher in the class, poor performance on test, quiz or homework.
Andrew J. Fuligni and colleagues found the use of the sleeping time on studies not helping children to excel academically, but on the other hand making them difficult to understand the portion covered in the class next day and performing poorly on tests and quiz.
"Sacrificing sleep for extra study time is counterproductive," Andrew J. Fuligni, professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences and a senior scientist at the Jane and Terry Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, said in a news release. "As other studies have found, our results indicated that extra time spent studying cuts into adolescents' sleep on a daily basis, and it is this reduced sleep that accounts for the increase in academic problems that occurs after days of increased studying. Although these nights of extra studying may seem necessary, they can come at a cost."
According to the investigators, planning and following a systematic time table for study and other daily activities can help students to succeed academically.
"Academic success may depend on finding strategies to avoid having to give up sleep to study, such as maintaining a consistent study schedule across days, using school time as efficiently as possible, and sacrificing time spent on other, less essential activities," Fuligni, who initiated the study, explained.
Results of the study have been published in the journal Child Development.
