The Effect of Sleep Deprivation on a Student’s Performance

Introduction

Modern innovation has provided humanity with so many great things, ranging from connectivity with friends and family to constant updates on information, whether it be in the form of texts and alerts, or just notifications in general. Whether you are a student with homework to do, or a worker with papers to write or documents to edit, these alerts divert our focus with a small buzz or just the simple act of lighting up. And according to research from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, it can take up to 25 minutes just to regain focus after being distracted. That number is quite large for the small amount of time we are awake in our busy lives. Given a high schooler’s typical school day is around seven hours, focus can be hard for some people if even these small diversions of attention can make such a large impact. Though these interactions can be prevented, the fact that our attention to a subject can be so volatile strikes a problem. Furthermore, parents and students question the brutal start times, students are drowsy and half-asleep and have to force themselves to stay awake because missed information can be detrimental later down the course. Eventually this pileup becomes more and more heavy for a student to handle, and even on some occasions, students are left studying material they did not understand fully due to prior sleeplessness and are in turn in a poor position in the course. Thus, the question of how sleep deprivation, otherwise known as sleeplessness, can affect a student’s ability to focus and performance in school and on school work.

First and foremost, how does one define sleep deprivation? Well, there is a large range of definitions and interpretations of this term, as some people may feel like seven hours gets them perfectly energized for the day, but numerous studies from universities have compiled data that suggested that the upper echelon of the studies’ results seemed to be around the eight hour range. This does not mean one that sleeps seven hours and fifty-nine minutes is considered sleep-deprived, it is just considered a rough estimate of what people should be getting to have an alert and more accurate and active state of mind to be able to capture information. To quantify this theory, a study that had a subject work a day shift as well as a night shift that required constant attention in both shifts found that eight hours even seemed to be on the lower end of that was needed for the double shift, in fact they found this extended wakefulness was associated with an increased risk of accidents and injuries, comparable to those associated with alcohol intoxication. (Plos Journals) Furthermore, the US National Library of Medicine stated that most widely studied cognitive domains in sleep deprivation research are attention and working memory, which in fact are closely related. They divided working memory into four subsystems: “phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, episodic buffer, and central executive.” After extensive tests with controlled experiments, they measured each of these sections and concluded from the results that sleep deprivation was directly linked to decrease in attention and working memory. Thus, if a student is left staying up from work, it is very likely that due to their deprivation of sleep, their attention to details would likely be hindered and consequently their grades.

From said studies, we have established that attention and memory are directly affected by deprivation of sleep, but the specifics of each of the said tests come to these conclusions from small samples that tried their best to regulate cycles and variables to get the most accurate results. To elaborate and explain how these tests are conducted, I read from a part of the detailed Cognitive Science Volume 33 Issue 5. They had compiled biomathematical models of alertness over the years past couple of years that investigate the changes associated with time awake and circadian rhythms that occur across a variety of dependent variables. In their generated graph, they quantified one’s alertness with respect to time as cognitive throughput and found that one that was completely deprived of sleep for seventy-two hours was found to have less than 10% alertness as to a baseline normal eight hours of sleep. To test their generated model, these researchers set to test subjects’ performances on a set of tasks across 88 continuous hours of total sleep deprivation. Participants were 13 healthy men between the ages of 22 and 37 years of age with normal sleep habits. To ensure that subjects had established a normal sleep schedule and that they were well rested, they were asked to adhere to a set schedule involving 8 hours of sleep per night for 1 week prior to entering the lab, and they were monitored for compliance using a combination of actigraph data and time‐stamped phone‐ins. They were given small tasks that took about thirty minutes every two hours and during this total sleep deprivation time, subjects began to have slower and slower response times, as expected, but not as extreme as the ones projected, but bad enough that they noticed a significant decrease in their psychomotor vigilance test results. To summarize, complete deprivation of sleep obviously had a very negative effect on the subjects’ performance but said subjects took weeks to adjust to normal levels of cognitive performance. This reflects what happens in schools as the circumstances are not as extreme, but one can expect similar results if less than ones needed amount of sleep is not met for an extensive amount of time, for example, a school year.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, these results have limitations. People have a lot of things going on in their life. They stay up when they want to, whether it be sleeplessness or completing a task. This test cannot be given a solid conclusion like a equals b or anything like that. The scientists that worked on this topic controlled their test as much as they could, but the definitive answer to the question is still considered up for interpretation, but a strong correlation can be determined from the various tests that have been conducted over the years. In conclusion, Sleep deprivation does have a direct correlation with attention and ability to focus and memory, but the effects are ultimately different for different people, but the relative trend for the populus can be seen and a relative professional conclusion that the less sleep results in worse performance and loss of attention has been made.