This is what happened when we let high school students choose what time they would start studying

Anyone who has ever tried to wake teens in the morning to school knows that this is a serious challenge, sometimes even heartbreaking. Researchers checked Germany's high school students' preference for changing their school hours from eight to nine in the morning, and were surprised by the results

This is what happened when we let high school students choose what time they would start studying

In the video: Important facts about sleep

The data shows that our society is in a serious crisis of sleep deprivation. Probably our pace of life, technology and relentless desire to stay up to date causes us to cut back on our sleep, which is a cost. And anyone who raises teens at home - or remembers himself at that age - knows that they are the ones most affected by this shortage.

It is precisely because of this that, in recent decades around the world, they have been exploring the potential benefits of changing school hours in high schools. In 2014, for example, the US Pediatrician Association issued a recommendation to postpone the start of middle school and upper secondary school to 8:30 a.m. An expert on sleep medicine named Dr. Judith Evans presented a research study, which concluded that lack of sleep May lead to anxiety, depression, obesity and car accidents. "When it comes to teens, sleeplessness is even worse because they are experiencing post-adolescent biological changes that are affecting their sleep patterns," she explained.

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To date, most of the research done in the field has looked at the effects of constant and arbitrary change made by the school, but what happens if the children let themselves decide and decide what time they will start to study in the morning?

At Ellsdorf High School in West Germany, they decided to allow a team of researchers, led by chronobiologist Til Ronenberg, to investigate this question (chronobiology is a branch that deals with periodic phenomena among living organisms). Ellsdorf High School, known for its innovative teaching methods, practices an American education system called the Dalton Program, which calls for flexible teaching methods tailored to students and helps children learn at their own pace.

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Here's how the experiment went: For nine weeks during 2016, the researchers tried to measure the effects of the system change on the adult students in the school - i.e., grades 10, 11, and 12. While the younger students were still forced to enter the school at 8 a.m., as usual, the older students were given the opportunity to start the day about an hour later, then complete the missed hour later this week as a self-timer. For the nine weeks (three before the system was changed, and six weeks after), the researchers collected daily sleep diaries from the students who participated in the experiment, and at the same time collected body movement data from wrist monitor devices given to some students.

Most students took advantage of the time added before the late mornings for sleep. Awakening girl gif (Photo: Giphy)

Old girl gif (Photo: Giphy)

The researchers found that giving students the opportunity to postpone their day's start time, even just an hour, added helpful sleep time to them. "In our study, almost all the students who participated - 97 percent - enjoyed the later mornings and slept an average of an extra hour during those days," the authors write in their article. "An important fact is that this figure was shared by the subjects on all important criteria: chronotype (the person's tendency to sleep at a certain time during a 24-hour period), gender, grade, and the number of days selected for late start."

Why is this an important finding?

Because, on the one hand, it seems clear to us that students who choose to start studying later will earn extra hours of sleep, on the other hand - these are teens, and it is likely that later schooling can encourage them to stay awake later in the night before school, eliminating the benefits of "the benefit." ". But this did not happen. The results of the study showed that students slept an average of 1.1 hours longer than they used to, increasing sleep time from 6.9 hours on average to 8 hours. The study found no evidence that sleeping hours differed from night before morning starting at nine to morning starting at eight in the morning.

Surprisingly, students did not choose to start late each day. Old girl on the train (Photo: ShutterStock)

Girl sleeping on a train ride (Photo: ShutterStock)

Researchers were surprised to find out how few students chose to take advantage of the late start. All in all, they chose to start late only 39 percent of the time, which means about two days out of five days a week of regular schooling. However, when students started later, they rated themselves as benefiting from higher quality sleep, and survey responses at the end of the experiment indicated that they felt less tired, could concentrate better during class and also felt an improved ability to study at home after school.

Of course, the study was a limitation, which the researchers recognized: All results were obtained as a result of the students' reporting of themselves, and perhaps things like naps during the day and more were not reported. At the same time, some important insights are found from the experiment, whereby students like to be given the choice of when they will start school in the morning. The researchers concluded that "in later school days, students have the option of sleeping longer. This should reduce the accumulation of sleep deprivation during the week. In addition, and this is especially important for practical applications, students prefer the flexible system, which causes their subjective variables to be improved." .