Teenagers Naturally Sleep Differently According To Research, Schools Debate Adjusting Schedules

 

NPR (7/15, O'Connor) reports schools across the state of Florida are debating the appropriate time to start high school courses in the morning. New research from University of Minnesota researcher Kyla Wahlstrom says that high-schoolers go through a sleep phase shift that causes them to naturally go to sleep later in the night and stay asleep longer into the morning. Central Florida school districts are considering changing their schedules based on the new information. St. Johns County Schools decided to start at 9:15 beginning in 2006 and has seen an improvement in student performance since that time.

Study: US Teens Less Likely To Engage In Bullying

HealthDay (4/25, Mozes) reports that according to a study published online April 17 in the American Journal of Public Health, US adolescents “are much less likely to engage in bullying than they were a decade ago.” After surveying middle and high school students between the years 1998 and 2010, researchers found that “instances of both verbal and physical bullying dropped by roughly half, with much of the decline seen specifically among boys.” The study’s author, Jessamyn Perlus, “a fellow in the division of intramural population health research with the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development,” part of the US National Institutes of Health, “described her team’s findings as ‘encouraging.’”

Duncan’s Support For Later High School Start Times Noted

Holly Yettick writes at the Education Week (3/19) “Inside School Research” blog that a recent report from the University of Minnesota “has helped to awaken a nationwide movement to start school later so students can get more sleep,” noting that the report indicates that starting high school after 8:30 a.m. can improve academic performance, boost attendance rates, and reduce “teenagers’ car crashes in the areas surrounding schools.” The piece notes that interest in moving back high school start times got a boost from Education Secretary Arne Duncan last fall, when he suggested that “secondary schools start later so students can get more sleep.” Yettick quotes Duncan saying, “There’s a lot of research and common sense that lots of teens struggle to get up ... to get on the bus. I’d love to see more districts, you know, seriously contemplating a later start time.” The New York Times (3/14, Hoffman) also mentions Duncan’s support for the concept at its “Well” blog.

Delayed School Start Times May Benefit Teens

In a front page article, the New York Times (3/14, Hoffman) reports that across the US, numerous school districts have moved high-school starting times to later in the day to accommodate the fact that adolescents “are developmentally driven to be late to bed, late to rise.” University of Minnesota researchers, “funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, studied eight high schools in three states before and after they moved to later start times in recent years.” In a report published March 12, “they found that the later a school’s start time, the better off the students were on many measures, including mental health, car crash rates, attendance and, in some schools, grades and standardized test scores.”

        The AP (3/14) also covers this story.