BYU study says high school students score best with seven hours sleep

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National guidelines indicate nine hours of sleep is the best for high school students; however, a recent BYU study says as far as test scores go, not so much.

BYU economics professors Eric Eide and Mark Showalter conducted research to find the relationship between sleep and standardized test scores among teens. The study analyzed a representative sample of 1,724 U.S. primary and secondary school students. The main interesting finding: optimal sleep time needed for 16-year-olds is seven hours.

“Economists look at education as a really important part of human behavior,” Showalter said.  “There is also lots of economic work on the health side … so this [study] is merging those two very well defined sets of economic questions.”

Lauren Pope, a junior at Timpview High, said she began to go to bed around 9:30 p.m. and wake up at 5:30 a.m. this year to attend early morning LDS seminary. She said although she generally feels more tired now, she is doing great in school.

“But I know I always feel better when I get more sleep,” Pope said.

Adam Schulz, a senior at Northridge High, said he agreed with what the study found. He said he sleeps about seven hours a night and his GPA is high.

“I do feel better when I get seven to eight hours of sleep at night,” Schulz said. “But when I oversleep, like nine hours, I’m usually more tired than I was the night before.”

However, his mother, Sarah Schulz, said she doesn’t agree with the study. She said she used to make sure her son slept eight to nine hours before, but now she lets him make his own choices about it.

“I don’t think seven hours of sleep is a lot,” she said. “I think it’s something that has developed over the years as the demands on high school students have grown, the homework and other activities that they’re involved in, that they kind of tend to move to a shorter time period.”

Showalter said the study is not to advocate any particular parental structure for children. He said there is much more of a parental judgment based on individual characteristics of a child and circumstances they are under.

“It’s more of, ‘let us break a mold that nine hours is somehow perfect’ … so people would look to their own characteristics, their own patterns based on that, rather than these arbitrary national guidelines,” he said.

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