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I'm extremely oblivious to what the benefits to starting later are, and how stable the benefits will be over time. Anyone care to explain? I'm particularly con

I'm extremely oblivious to what the benefits to starting later are, and how stable the benefits will be over time. Anyone care to explain? I'm particularly concerned that this will incentivize students to just stay up later, negating many benefits of increased sleep.

ryanhuff 7y ago
As the parent of a high school freshman boy, I've observed that his demand for sleep seems to have recently gone up, but so has his school work load. He's regularly up until 11pm doing homework as it is, and waking up tired at 7am the following day. If they simply shift his school start and end times 30 minutes later, I don't see much net benefit for him.
mLuby 7y ago
That assumes sleep(2100, 0500) == sleep(2300, 0700), which anecdataly is false.
- epmaybe 7y ago
  Could you elaborate? I think you mean that there are benefits to waking up later due to the effect light has on circadian rhythm, but I don't want to assume.
  - mLuby 7y ago
    That, and that some people are naturally early birds and others are night owls.
joshvm 7y ago
The benefits are sleep, as the article says. I would guess this outweighs the risk that a few students use the opportunity to stay up longer. (although pre 8am seems excessively early to me - we started around 8:50) > I'm particularly concerned that this will incentivize students to just stay up later, negating many benefits of increased sleep. This is missing the point. Teenagers staying up late is often interpreted as laziness or disobedience, when there is increasing evidence that it's a symptom of an (ab)normal circadian rhythm.
- epmaybe 7y ago
  I'm familiar with delayed sleep phase syndrome, is that what you are referring to? You state that it's a symptom of abnormal circadian rhythm, which as far as I know is greatly affected by light exposure. If students are awake later, using their phones/computers, won't that negatively affect their socially acceptable circadian rhythm? I agree that staying up late shouldn't be considered being lazy or disobedient, but I'm having trouble understanding your point. Maybe you could elaborate on your point regarding the circadian rhythm?
  - joshvm 7y ago
    Not abnormal, maybe a bad choice of phrasing there. Rather that during puberty people need more sleep and their rhythm shifts forward. This is exacerbated by poor sleep hygiene (eg screen use), but in general teenagers get tired later on than their parents. Hence suggesting that kids will just stay up later is missing the point. The stereotype that kids stay up late partially arises becuase they have shifted circadian rhythms and they can't help it, not that they want to take advantage of later school starts. And so the benefits of later starts are important becuase it more naturally fits with teenage sleep patterns. For more info: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/19546564/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/19546564/ > Adolescents continue to show a delayed circadian (or internal clock) phase as indicated by daily endocrine rhythms even after several weeks of regulated schedules that allow for sufficient sleep. This delay is maintained under controlled laboratory conditions in which there is limited possibility for social influence
moozilla 7y ago
I found the statistics in Dr. Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep [1] pretty compelling. Starting an hour layer improves SAT scores: One of the first test cases happened in the township of Edina, Minnesota. Here, school start times for teenagers were shifted from 7:25 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. More striking than the forty-three minutes of extra sleep that these teens reported getting was the change in academic performance, indexed using a standardized measure called the Scholastic Assessment Test, or SAT. In the year before this time change, the average verbal SAT scores of the top-performing students was a very respectable 605. The following year, after switching to an 8:30 a.m. start time, that score rose to an average 761 for the same top-tier bracket of students. Math SAT scores also improved, increasing from an average of 683 in the year prior to the time change, to 739 in the year after. Add this all up, and you see that investing in delaying school start times—allowing students more sleep and better alignment with their unchangeable biological rhythms—returned a net SAT profit of 212 points. That improvement will change which tier of university those teenagers go to, potentially altering their subsequent life trajectories as a consequence. (This is one example, that has been replicated many times, he covers more in the book.) It saves even saves lives: Yet something even more profound has happened in this ongoing story of later school start times—something that researchers did not anticipate: the life expectancy of students increased. The leading cause of death among teenagers is road traffic accidents, and in this regard, even the slightest dose of insufficient sleep can have marked consequences, as we have discussed. When the Mahtomedi School District of Minnesota pushed their school start time from 7:30 to 8:00 a.m., there was a 60 percent reduction in traffic accidents in drivers sixteen to eighteen years of age. Teton County in Wyoming enacted an even more dramatic change in school start time, shifting from a 7:35 a.m. bell to a far more biologically reasonable one of 8:55 a.m. The result was astonishing—a 70 percent reduction in traffic accidents in sixteen- to eighteen-year-old drivers. To place that in context, the advent of anti-lock brake technology (ABS)—which prevents the wheels of a car from seizing up under hard braking, allowing the driver to still maneuver the vehicle—reduced accident rates by around 20 to 25 percent. It was deemed a revolution. Here is a simple biological factor—sufficient sleep—that will drop accident rates by more than double that amount in our teens. There's more reasons, like improving attendance and decreasing drug/alcohol use, but these are the ones that stuck out to me. There was another statistic that I can't immediately find a quotation for that was pretty mind-blowing for me, which was that in university, the difference in performance in controls and students who started class an hour later was equivalent to the difference between controls and students who had a professor a standard deviation above the average. They even showed that this was dose dependent (an extra hour later had more effect). I think it's pretty incredible, considering the skill gap between an average professor and a great one, that simply taking a class at a 10am instead of 8am can increase learning so much. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501144316 https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...

ryanhuff 7y ago

As the parent of a high school freshman boy, I've observed that his demand for sleep seems to have recently gone up, but so has his school work load. He's regularly up until 11pm doing homework as it is, and waking up tired at 7am the following day. If they simply shift his school start and end times 30 minutes later, I don't see much net benefit for him.

mLuby 7y ago

That assumes sleep(2100, 0500) == sleep(2300, 0700), which anecdataly is false.

epmaybe 7y ago
Could you elaborate? I think you mean that there are benefits to waking up later due to the effect light has on circadian rhythm, but I don't want to assume.
- mLuby 7y ago
  That, and that some people are naturally early birds and others are night owls.

joshvm 7y ago

The benefits are sleep, as the article says. I would guess this outweighs the risk that a few students use the opportunity to stay up longer. (although pre 8am seems excessively early to me - we started around 8:50) > I'm particularly concerned that this will incentivize students to just stay up later, negating many benefits of increased sleep. This is missing the point. Teenagers staying up late is often interpreted as laziness or disobedience, when there is increasing evidence that it's a symptom of an (ab)normal circadian rhythm.

epmaybe 7y ago
I'm familiar with delayed sleep phase syndrome, is that what you are referring to? You state that it's a symptom of abnormal circadian rhythm, which as far as I know is greatly affected by light exposure. If students are awake later, using their phones/computers, won't that negatively affect their socially acceptable circadian rhythm? I agree that staying up late shouldn't be considered being lazy or disobedient, but I'm having trouble understanding your point. Maybe you could elaborate on your point regarding the circadian rhythm?
- joshvm 7y ago
  Not abnormal, maybe a bad choice of phrasing there. Rather that during puberty people need more sleep and their rhythm shifts forward. This is exacerbated by poor sleep hygiene (eg screen use), but in general teenagers get tired later on than their parents. Hence suggesting that kids will just stay up later is missing the point. The stereotype that kids stay up late partially arises becuase they have shifted circadian rhythms and they can't help it, not that they want to take advantage of later school starts. And so the benefits of later starts are important becuase it more naturally fits with teenage sleep patterns. For more info: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/19546564/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/19546564/ > Adolescents continue to show a delayed circadian (or internal clock) phase as indicated by daily endocrine rhythms even after several weeks of regulated schedules that allow for sufficient sleep. This delay is maintained under controlled laboratory conditions in which there is limited possibility for social influence

moozilla 7y ago

I found the statistics in Dr. Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep [1] pretty compelling. Starting an hour layer improves SAT scores: One of the first test cases happened in the township of Edina, Minnesota. Here, school start times for teenagers were shifted from 7:25 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. More striking than the forty-three minutes of extra sleep that these teens reported getting was the change in academic performance, indexed using a standardized measure called the Scholastic Assessment Test, or SAT. In the year before this time change, the average verbal SAT scores of the top-performing students was a very respectable 605. The following year, after switching to an 8:30 a.m. start time, that score rose to an average 761 for the same top-tier bracket of students. Math SAT scores also improved, increasing from an average of 683 in the year prior to the time change, to 739 in the year after. Add this all up, and you see that investing in delaying school start times—allowing students more sleep and better alignment with their unchangeable biological rhythms—returned a net SAT profit of 212 points. That improvement will change which tier of university those teenagers go to, potentially altering their subsequent life trajectories as a consequence. (This is one example, that has been replicated many times, he covers more in the book.) It saves even saves lives: Yet something even more profound has happened in this ongoing story of later school start times—something that researchers did not anticipate: the life expectancy of students increased. The leading cause of death among teenagers is road traffic accidents, and in this regard, even the slightest dose of insufficient sleep can have marked consequences, as we have discussed. When the Mahtomedi School District of Minnesota pushed their school start time from 7:30 to 8:00 a.m., there was a 60 percent reduction in traffic accidents in drivers sixteen to eighteen years of age. Teton County in Wyoming enacted an even more dramatic change in school start time, shifting from a 7:35 a.m. bell to a far more biologically reasonable one of 8:55 a.m. The result was astonishing—a 70 percent reduction in traffic accidents in sixteen- to eighteen-year-old drivers. To place that in context, the advent of anti-lock brake technology (ABS)—which prevents the wheels of a car from seizing up under hard braking, allowing the driver to still maneuver the vehicle—reduced accident rates by around 20 to 25 percent. It was deemed a revolution. Here is a simple biological factor—sufficient sleep—that will drop accident rates by more than double that amount in our teens. There's more reasons, like improving attendance and decreasing drug/alcohol use, but these are the ones that stuck out to me. There was another statistic that I can't immediately find a quotation for that was pretty mind-blowing for me, which was that in university, the difference in performance in controls and students who started class an hour later was equivalent to the difference between controls and students who had a professor a standard deviation above the average. They even showed that this was dose dependent (an extra hour later had more effect). I think it's pretty incredible, considering the skill gap between an average professor and a great one, that simply taking a class at a 10am instead of 8am can increase learning so much. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501144316 https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...