SA: Study shows sleep can impact on school results

AAP General News (Australia)
08-08-2008
SA: Study shows sleep can impact on school results

ADELAIDE, Aug 8 AAP - Lack of sleep can affect children's memories, impacting on their
academic ability and dragging down their grades, research has found.

Flinders University psychologist and sleep researcher Michael Gradisar has completed
a study of adolescent children with the results contradicting previous investigations
that found school kids could cope with getting less than eight hours sleep.

The difference this time is that Dr Gradisar's study asked the students to tackle complex
activities rather than just simple memory tasks.

He found that the performance of the more complex tasks, that required information
to be retained while other information was also processed, was affected by levels of sleep.

"Previous studies suggested that despite getting inadequate sleep, kids could tolerate
it and still function," Dr Gradisar said.

"But we have found that when challenged with a more complex task, adolescents who have
been having less than eight hours sleep begin to have trouble."

Dr Gradisar said children who had insufficient sleep displayed an impaired ability
to encode, store and retrieve information with implications for subjects such as spelling
and mathematics.

"Kids learn a whole range of different abilities at school and we have shown that some
of these abilities are susceptible to sleep loss," he said.

"This has implications for their learning and their overall grades."

Flinders University has also embarked on a wider study to examine the prevalence of
inadequate sleep among students in years nine to 11.

Dr Gradisar said early indications suggested the incidence of problematic sleep was
much higher than anticipated with some students taking almost an hour to fall asleep.

AAP tjd/it/mn

KEYWORD: SLEEP

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