Lack of Sleep and Educational Performance
Sleep as we all know it is a very important function for both cognitive development as well as emotional stability. So how is sleep a relevant discussion in the achievement gap you might be asking? Dive in further and I shall explain to you exactly how it plays a crucial role in one’s ability to perform well in school!
The Wiley Online Library says that, “Research with adults and children has shown that sleep plays a vital and complex role in multiple physiological systems that maintain health and promote optimal functioning across many domains.” It goes on to say that, “For children, school is an important domain of functioning, and emerging research links sleep to academic achievement. Many children from lower socioeconomic status (SES) families sleep poorly, and when their sleep is compromised, the effects on cognitive functioning and academic achievement may be greater than for less disadvantaged children.” From this we can take that if you belong to a low income family, you are more likely to have poor sleep patterns, which in turn will hinder your capability to perform at your best in the classroom. Low income families tend to also have smaller household with more people occupying the space, while higher income families are the opposite. With this information we can say that students from low income families tend to have to share rooms, beds and living spaces with family members. This in turn makes sleeping schedules, and patterns a little more difficult to come by, than those coming from higher class families.
Sleep is crucial for a student to properly function in the classroom, but sleep is also where the brain does a lot of its thinking, and memorization. Without sleep one is sacrificing their ability to remember what was going on in the class, and remember what important information they may have come across during the day. “It is becoming clear that sleep plays a vital and complex role in multiple physiological systems that maintain health and promote optimal functioning across many domains over the course of child development.” The Wiley Library states, as well as it states that, “We have long known that in adults, attention, cognition, and memory are significantly impaired after total or partial sleep deprivation (Durmer & Dinges, 2005; Pilcher & Huffcut, 1996).” Two more studies they offer from their website gives us the information that lack of sleep for only one night dramatically impairs one’s ability to remember due to the lack of the communication between the hippocampus and the cerebral cortex, (which is most prominent during sleep), and in the lack of sleep prior to learning has a effect they state as “deleterious,” meaning that it is harmed or absent. Knowing this information you can only imagine the effects on a young student whose body, and brain is not only trying to develop, grow, remember, as well as process a lot of information at once. Given that students from low income backgrounds have poorer sleep patterns, than those coming from higher classed backgrounds, it is easy to connect the lack of sleep with poor educational performance, as well as low motivation for learning itself.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1750-8606.2010.00151.x