College students who regularly attend classes and sleep well are more likely to get good grades. Attending classes increases students’ interactions with instructors and classmates and provides structured time to cover key learning points. Getting good sleep is also important for optimizing cognitive performance and readiness to learn.
Inadequate sleep affects attention and memory processes , which can prevent students from reaching their full learning potential in class. Additionally, tiredness and excessive sleep are frequently cited as reasons why college students miss classes. The effects of absenteeism and presenteeism on grades can have long-term consequences on students’ employment opportunities, job performance ratings, and salary. Therefore, universities must adopt practices that improve students’ attendance rates and sleep behaviors to position them for success in the classroom and in the workforce.
There is growing evidence that early school start times may be detrimental to students’ sleep and daytime functioning.
During adolescence and early adulthood, environmental and biological factors cause a delay in preferred sleep times. Therefore, students who go to bed late and must get up early for class have a shorter night’s sleep. The circadian drive for sleep may also peak near the time when students are expected to attend early morning classes. The combined effects of short sleep and circadian misalignment can lead to daytime sleepiness and impaired cognitive performance. Delaying the start time of high schools has been shown to increase sleep duration and decrease drowsiness by allowing adolescents to sleep more. However, there are mixed findings regarding the benefits of starting school later on absenteeism and academic outcomes.
Meta-analyses and critical reviews have found no consistent evidence of improved attendance or grades. Results were also shown to differ between schools after a district-wide delay in school start times. Differences between studies and schools could be related to school characteristics, sampling bias, or methods for assessing attendance and academic performance. However, the large body of correlational and interventional work on school start times and sleep health in adolescents has led many school districts to delay their start times.
Summary Attending classes and sleeping well are important for students’ academic success. Here, we test whether morning classes are associated with lower attendance, less sleep, and poorer academic performance by analyzing college students’ digital traces. Wi-Fi logs from 23,391 students revealed that class attendance was approximately ten percentage points lower for classes at 08:00 compared to later start times. Diurnal patterns of learning management system logins in 39,458 students and actigraphy data in 181 students demonstrated that nighttime sleep was one hour shorter for early classes because students woke up earlier than usual. Analyzes of 33,818 students’ grades showed that the number of days per week they had morning classes was negatively correlated with grade point average. |
Figure : Students with morning classes on more days of the week have a lower GPA . a, Grade distributions are shown for courses with class sessions that occurred exclusively in the morning (starting before 12:00), exclusively in the afternoon (starting at 12:00 or later), or both morning and afternoon. The number of grades for morning-only (AM), afternoon-only (PM), and morning/afternoon (MIX) courses are indicated in the graph. b, Boxplots show the distribution of grade point average by the number of days per week that students had morning classes. Boxes show median and interquartile range. Whiskers show the 10th and 90th percentiles. Sample sizes are shown at the top of each bar. Effect sizes (Cohen’s d) with 95% CIs and bootstrap sampling distributions are plotted for days with morning classes (1–5 days) versus without morning classes. Data were collected from 33,818 unique students over six semesters.
Discussion
Our study showed that sleep behavior and learning-related outcomes were associated with the time of day college students had their first class. Many students may be forced to make one of two undesirable decisions when faced with early school start times: sleeping longer instead of attending class or waking up earlier to attend class. Wi-Fi confirmed attendance rates were approximately ten percentage points lower for students taking classes at 08:00 compared to later class start times. Even though students frequently slept past the start of classes at 08:00, they still lost about 1 h of sleep on average compared to days when they only had afternoon classes or no classes. .
Actigraphy data showed that students fell asleep during almost a third of lecture classes that began at 08:00.
These results are consistent with survey studies of college students in which common reasons for absenteeism included lecturing too early, lack of sleep, tiredness, and oversleeping.
Wi-Fi confirmed lecture attendance was lower for morning classes . a, Instructor-reported attendance was strongly correlated with Wi-Fi-confirmed attendance (Pearson correlation analysis, two-tailed test: r (51) = 0.98, 95% CI = 0.97 to 0 .99, P < 0.001). Each circle shows attendance data for an individual class session (53 class sessions in 13 different courses). The black trace shows the linear regression line of best fit and the dashed red trace is the line of unity. b, Boxplots show the distribution of individually determined Wi-Fi confirmed attendance rates for different class start times across 23,391 unique students. Boxes show median and interquartile range. Whiskers show the 10th and 90th percentiles. Sample sizes for each class start time are shown at the top of each bar. C, Effect sizes (Cohen’s d) are shown for within-student comparisons of Wi-Fi confirmed attendance rates. Effect sizes were determined for each class start time relative to 08:00. The number of students in each comparison is indicated at the top of the graph. The paired mean difference for each comparison is shown with 95% CI values and bootstrap sampling distribution. Ref, reference category (08:00 class start time).
In conclusion , our study suggests that universities should consider avoiding mandatory early morning classes. Although early classes are often scheduled to maximize the use of resources (classroom space and faculty time spent teaching) and to minimize scheduling conflicts between students and faculty, our results indicate that they can There is a trade-off , so students are more likely to miss classes, sleep less, and have a lower GPA. Early classes could be scheduled later in the day if classrooms and conference rooms are not being fully utilized, and making classrooms a shared resource between departments could open up time slots for more courses to be held in the afternoon. /night in parallel. To justify adopting such measures, universities need scalable methods to evaluate the impact of their class scheduling practices on students. Our study showed that archived digital traces that universities routinely collect can be used to assess relationships between class start times and student behavior. In future studies, these approaches can be used to test the effectiveness of interventions to improve students’ class attendance, sleep, and academic performance. |
