Latest Issue of the MindBrainEd Think Tank + (ISSN 2434-1002) 1 MindBrained Bulletin Think Tank Sleep Jan 2018 | Page 3

Think Tank: Sleep
Josh Brunotte

Motivating Better Sleep Habits in Students: Are
Grades Enough?

After studying about university students’ general health
habits and specifically about their sleep behavior over
the last few years, the conclusion for me seems to end up
being, “They have terrible sleep habits, but what can we
do about it?” That is an important question and one that
is not simple to answer. You stop students from sleep in
class by waking them up or keeping them active, but to
make any real difference you need to somehow affect the
sleep choices they are making at home. Is that even a
possibility for an instructor?
First it would be good to think through what kinds of students are consistently failing to get enough
sleep before they come to class. If we had to sketch out archetypes of who these sleepy students are,
one would be the overworked, snowed under person buckling from the weight of homework, part-
time jobs, circles/clubs, and everything else in their packed schedules. Another category would be the
student with terrible time management, who aside from not getting to bed on time, is late to class or
often doesn’t turn up, hasn’t done the homework, and is generally a step behind what they need to do.
Even though these two types are quite different, the end
result can be the same – poorer grades. And importantly
this often means poorer marks on class assessments. An
interesting article by Baert, Omey, Verhaest, and Vermeir
(2015) has shown a causal link between sleep and test
grades among freshman university students in Belgium,
with lower levels of sleep quality correlating with a drop in
assessment scores. They used a survey called the
Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) that my collaborator,
Deborah Broadby, and I have recently used with students
in Japan. This instrument measures not just the length but
the overall sleep quality of participants. They saw that a
difference of one standard deviation on the PSQI meant the
difference in about half a letter grade (4.85%) on these students’ test scores. This is the smoking gun
showing that how well students sleep directly affects their grades.
So, now what? We have this data showing the relationship between grades and sleep, but is this
enough to motivate students? Say you create a lesson plan in which you have students survey each
other about their sleep habits, you compare the results, then you hit them with the results of Baert, et