‘Night owl’ students perform worse academically due to 'social jet lag', study finds

It is often said that when you go to university, you’re only able to achieve two out of these three fundamental student necessities: having enough sleep, maintaining a social life and obtaining good grades.

Lack of sleep can take its toll on your grades, especially if you’re a “night owl” by nature following an “early bird” schedule.

A recent study has discovered that students who typically go to bed late and wake up early for class suffer academically when they fail to take their circadian rhythm into account.

They wind up experiencing self-imposed “social jet lag”, which can result in a drop in grades.

In the study published in Scientific Reports, the researchers assessed the activity of 14,894 students enrolled at Northeastern Illinois University as they logged onto the establishment’s learning management system over the course of four semesters, from autumn 2014 to spring 2016.

The researchers were able to document whether students could be categorised as “larks”, “finches” or “owls” by noting when the students scheduled their classes and tracking their activity levels on the days that they didn’t have class.

Aaron Schirmer, associate professor of biology at Northeastern Illinois University, and Benjamin Smarr, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, discovered that as many as 50 per cent of the students had chosen to attend classes that took place before they were fully alert.

10 per cent of the students had already reached their peak level of alertness before attending class.

For the 40 per cent who opted to attend classes in sync with their body clocks, they consequently performed better academically.

“We found that the majority of students were being jet-lagged by their class times, which correlated very strongly with decreased academic performance," said Smarr.

“Different people really do have biologically diverse timing, so there isn’t a one-time-fits-all solution for education,” he explained.

Schirmer and Smarr believe that rather than encourage students who naturally go to bed later to try to hit the hay earlier, they should attempt to fit their class schedule around their circadian rhythm in order to reap the benefits.

“Rather than admonish late students to go to bed earlier, in conflict with their biological rhythms, we should work to individualise education so that learning and classes are structured to take advantage of knowing what time of day a given student will be most capable of learning,” Smarr said.

“It’s really important for students to think about the timing of their activities to try to optimise their educational efforts,” said Schirmer.