Sleepmore in Seattle: Later School Start Times Are Associated with More Sleep and Better Performance in High School Students

Overview

Journal Sci Adv

Specialties Biology
Science

Date 2018 Dec 15

PMID 30547089

Citations 51

Authors

Gideon P Dunster

Luciano de la Iglesia

Miriam Ben-Hamo

Claire Nave

Jason G Fleischer

Satchidananda Panda

Horacio O de la Iglesia

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Most teenagers are chronically sleep deprived. One strategy proposed to lengthen adolescent sleep is to delay secondary school start times. This would allow students to wake up later without shifting their bedtime, which is biologically determined by the circadian clock, resulting in a net increase in sleep. So far, there is no objective quantitative data showing that a single intervention such as delaying the school start time significantly increases daily sleep. The Seattle School District delayed the secondary school start time by nearly an hour. We carried out a pre-/post-research study and show that there was an increase in the daily median sleep duration of 34 min, associated with a 4.5% increase in the median grades of the students and an improvement in attendance.

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