From prior research, educators and psychologists have long suspected that starting the school day a little later in the morning would greatly benefit students. In America, most secondary school days start between 7:30 and 8:30 am — meaning that children and teens have to get up pretty early each morning to make homeroom on time.
The problem is that children — and teenagers especially — forgo sleep in order to make these early start times. Because sleep is so vitally important to both our overall health and mental health, this results in less-than-optimal academic performance by teens early in the morning.
A new large-scale research provides more insight into the benefits of later start times for high school.
The researchers (McKeever & Clark, 2017) begin by noting that, “Sleep experts agree that school start times are not in synchronization with adolescent sleep cycles, affecting learning and overall well-being of students. Proven scientifically, the drive to fall asleep and alert from sleep shifts during adolescence. Previous studies suggest that adolescents need 9 hours or more a night to function at peak performance…”
[For more of this story, written by John M. Grohol, go to https://psychcentral.com/blog/...es-benefit-students/]
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