Should adolescents start school later?
From an article by Bold and other sources
An adolescent’s body clock, or circadian rhythm, is generally set to a later schedule than that of older and younger people – teenagers’ bodies tell them to stay up later and get up later, too. This means it can be challenging when they need to perform academically in the early hours of the morning.
Various pilot programs have found that later secondary school start times may help students get more sleep, feel less depressed, attend school more, and achieve higher grades. For example, when one school changed its start time from the already relatively late 8:50am to 10am, 12% more students made “good academic progress,” while the average number of student sick days dropped from 15 to 11.
Yet chronotypes – our natural preferences around sleeping and waking patterns – differ between adolescents, just as they do between adults. Night owls prefer to sleep later, while morning larks like to go to sleep earlier. The teenagers most likely to underperform academically when school starts early are those predisposed to being night owls. Morning larks, on the other hand, tend to do best. Starting school later might therefore be helpful for night owls – but unhelpful, or even detrimental, for morning larks.
A study examined how the interaction between the chronotype and school timing of an individual influences academic performance. A sample of 753 Argentinian students were randomly assigned to start school in the morning (07:45), afternoon (12:40) or evening (17:20). It showed that:
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For morning-attending students, early chronotypes perform better than late chronotypes in all school subjects, an effect that is largest for maths;
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This effect vanishes for students who attend school in the afternoon; and
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Late chronotypes benefit from evening classes.
Together, these results demonstrate that academic performance is improved when school times are better aligned with the biological rhythms of adolescents.
“Kids – or parents, at least – usually pick the school with the timing they prefer,” says Guadalupe Rodriguez Ferrante of the Laboratory of Neuroscience at the Universidad Torcuato di Tella in Buenos Aires, Argentina, who recently co-authored another study on adolescent chronotypes and school timings. “If you are a night owl, maybe you’re going to choose an afternoon school. However, there can be a shift in circadian rhythms during adolescence but for the vast majority of adolescents, school is simply starting too early.”
Read the full article here.
Are our secondary schools serving their pupils well by having a standard, universal, school day? Doesn't online learning give us some flexible options here?
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From an article by Bold and other sources, 26/06/2024