A Discussion of “Snooze or Lose: High School Start Times and Academic Achievement”
Or maybe not. But it still could be a good idea, according to some research by Groen and Pabilonia (2019).
The basic idea of moving the start time of high schools later comes down to two connected issues: (p. 204)
- Lack of sleep has been tied to lower cognitive performance, which is obviously detrimental to school outcomes. It is also tied to many other problematic issues such as higher rates of depression, higher rates of obesity, and higher likelihood of car accidents.
- Sleep research has shown that as children become adolescents, they have a change in their circadian rhythms, so they naturally wake up later.
That second point means students would have trouble going to sleep early to make up for having to get up early. Their bodies do not want to do either! Thus, they tend to just be sleep deprived.
The authors cite a 2006 National Sleep Foundation survey that found high school students reported sleeping on average 7.2 hours on a school night. The problem? That amount of sleep is well below the recommended 8–10 hours a night for that age group. (p. 206)
Even Congress has (sort of) addressed this issue. In 2007 in the House, the “Zzz’s to A’s Resolution” was introduced, calling for high schools to change their start times to 9:00 am. (p. 204)
That’s a revolution I could get behind!
But there are concerns of how this could cause disruption.
- Would students still be able to work jobs after school?
- What happens to extracurricular activities?
- How would this affect families if they have jobs that start earlier?
I am very familiar with these discussions that say we should shift high school start times later, but I don’t know if many people are. I think I am biased because as a night owl I remember how much I hated getting up early for school, so I have always been interested in this topic.
But given all of the above, it seems like a reasonable idea to propose shifting high school start times later to better align with the adolescent natural circadian rhythms. With better rest, the hope is they could perform better as measured by test scores.
Testing that hypothesis is exactly what the authors try to do using a national longitudinal data set. They use statistical tools…
…to identify the causal effect of start time on academic achievement…(with) a rich set of controls for individual (including lagged test scores), family, high school, and community characteristics. (p. 205)
They also investigate the impact of unobservable characteristics, like teacher quality, that could be correlated with start times.
For example, what if schools that adopt later test times tend to be struggling schools with lots of teacher turnover? That could obscure the impact of the change in start times.
Conversely, maybe only the most successful schools would make such a change. They have the data and statistical techniques to control for these possibilities. (p. 205)
The Model
In their preferred specification, school start time is the independent variable they are trying to explain. They include controls for: (p. 209)
- day length,
- lagged test scores, and
- school-level, district-level, county-level and state-level metrics.
Start time in their sample ranges from 7:00 am to 9:15 am with an average of 7:53 am. Nearly 80% of the sample have start times between 7:30 am and 8:29 am. (p. 206)
They wanted to control for day length because they want their results to show the effect of changing the school day later without changing to number of hours in school.
For the sample, they found it ranged between 5.5 hours per day to 8.75 hours per day. The average is 6.99 hours per day. (p. 206) I was surprised at the range across the nation.
Lagged test scores are included to try to account for student ability. The test scores used are a standardized test, the Woodcock-Johnson Revised tests of Basic Achievement.
They use 2 scores, the broad-reading and applied-problems. The former serves as a measure of reading achievement and the latter serves as a measure of mathematics reasoning achievement. (p. 207)
Results?
Maybe more subtle than I would like.
First, a one-hour delay in school start time led females to increase their sleep by a little over 30 minutes. And this seemed to be due to sleeping in because bedtime stayed the same. (p. 213)
For males, they, too, kept bedtime the same, slept in an extra half hour, but did not have an overall increase in time of sleep for the day. How? Their day-napping time went down. (p. 213)
For females they do find a positive, statistically significant relationship between starting school later and their reading scores but no relationship for males. They think that the lack of relationship for males is because even though night sleeping increased, total time asleep did not. (p. 214)
Specifically, they find
…a one hour later start time results in an increase in broad-reading test scores of 0.16 standard deviations. (p. 209)
There was no statistically significant effect on the female’s math scores. For males, neither reading nor math scores showed a statistically significant effect.
So, females see their reading scores improve and no one is made worse off — is changing school start time worth all the disruption if this is it?
Perhaps, because there was a positive relationship between starting school later and female participation in sports. For a one-hour delay in the start time, there is a predicted 21% increase. (p. 213)
Changing school times would be challenging given how many people would be impacted by it.
True, the impact on the scores was not dramatic, but it did not cause them to fall. If we also measured any improvements in health and mood for the students, we likely would find even more reasons to make this change.
I reviewed a similar study applicable to college students which also found early classes had a negative impact.
With all of the upheaval caused to school by the coronavirus, maybe this would be the time to consider shifting school times later. We could create a new normal instead of returning to the way things were.
I know my bias is showing but I think this would be a relatively easy change to improve the quality of life for so many.
References:
Groen, Jeffrey A. and Sabrina W. Pabilonia (2019). “Snooze or lose: High school start times and academic achievement.” Economics of Education Review, 72: 204–18
By Ellen Clardy, PhD on .
Exported from Medium on December 15, 2022.
