Short sleep and late bedtimes are detrimental to educational learning and knowledge transfer: An investigation of individual differences in susceptibility

ABSTRACT

Good sleep hygiene practices, including consistent bedtimes and 7–9 h of sleep/night, are theorized to benefit educational learning. However, individuals differ in how much sleep they need, as well as in their chronotype preference. Therefore, some students may be more vulnerable to the cognitive effects of sleep loss, later bedtimes and nonpreferred times of learning than others. One prominent example is the debate regarding whether sleep loss and later bedtimes affect classroom learning more in female or male students. To inform this gender-and-sleep-loss debate, we developed a virtual college-level lecture to use in a controlled, laboratory setting. During Session 1, 78 undergraduate students were randomly assigned to take the lecture at 12:00 (noon condition) or 19:30 (evening condition). Then participants wore wristband actigraphy for 1 week to monitor average and intraindividual variability in sleep duration, bedtime and midpoint of sleep. During Session 2, participants completed a test at the same time of day as Session 1. The test included basic questions that were similar to trained concepts during the lecture (trained items) as well as integration questions that required application of learned concepts (knowledge-transfer items). Bayesian analyses supported the null hypothesis that time of learning did not affect test performance. Collapsed across time of testing, regression analyses showed that shorter sleep durations and later bedtimes explained 13% of the variance in test performance. Longer sleep durations and earlier bedtimes predicted better test performance primarily in females, younger students and morning-types. Interestingly, students with above-median fluid intelligence scores were resilient to short sleep and late bedtimes. Our findings indicate that both sleep and circadian factors should be addressed to optimize educational learning, particularly in the students who are most susceptible to sleep loss.

KEYWORDS:

• Circadian rhythms
• evening classes
• gender
• intelligence
• individual vulnerability
• actigraphy
• metacognition
• chronotype

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Dan Howard for his development of the economics materials and to Zachary Pranske and Rachel West for their assistance with data collection.

Declaration of interest

The authors have no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Additional information

Funding

M.K.S. was partially supported by NIH AG053161 and T.T. was supported by the Baylor Transdisciplinary Research Undergraduate Experience Fellowship.