Research Proposal

Lydia Sedy

Prof. Sonia Apgar Begert

English 102

11 May 2015

Introduction

Many college students are known for procrastination, all nighter study sessions before exams, and similar activities that seriously affect sleep schedules. This project will look at how sleep affects the brain, particularly the role in complex processes such as memory or executive function thinking. Does losing just one hour of sleep have a significant impact on cognitive performance? Should students be concerned about the amount of sleep they are getting on a regular basis? Is weekend sleep debt a problem and should it be discouraged? What effective measures could be taken to solve the sleep problem? My purpose is to build an argument about the importance of regular sleep on everyday functioning, and that measures should be taken in school-age and college level students to maintain healthy sleep habits.

Review of Literature

Sources reviewed so far include “The Effects of Sleep Restriction and Extension on School-Age Children: What a Difference an Hour Makes” by Avi Sadeh, Ruet Gruber, and Amiran Raviv, published in the Child Developement journal in 2003. The authors specifically study the effects of moderate sleep restriction--an hour or less--to mimic what is common in everyday living. They found that extension of sleep led to improved memory function and improved performance on a complex reaction test. However, Yu Sun Bn, Nathaniel Marshall, and Nick Glozier analyzed cross sectional surveys in their project: “Sleeping at the Limits: The Changing Prevalence of Short and Long Sleep Durations in 10 Countries” and found that longer sleep durations have been linked to premature death, unemployment, and depression. The same study reported that America has not been getting any less sleep since 1985, contrary to what other studies propose. Amy Wolfson and Mary Carskadon reviewed studies over the past two decades and consistently found that participants still reported not getting enough sleep. In their project, “Sleep Schedules and Daytime Functioning in Adolescents” published in an earlier issue of Child Development in 1998, found that students who slept more at night and reported less daytime sleepiness had higher GPAs. Students with short-sleep were reported to be more depressed, sleepy during classes, and dealt with other sleep-related behavioral problems. Another study supports these claims and found that students who slept an adequate amount had higher GPAs than those who slept less. This was explored by William Kelly, Kathryn Kelly, and Robert Clanton in the article, “The Relationship Between Sleep Length and Grade-Point Average Among College Students” published in the College Student Journal in 2001. Scott Carrell, Teny Maghakian and James West found a correlation between school start times and academic success in their project “A’s from Zzzz’s? The Causal Effect of School Start Time on the Academic Achievement of Adolescents” published in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy in 2011. The authors studied students attending United States Air Force Academy to take advantage of the more controlled environment, and found that students who were assigned early morning classes had worse grades in those classes and in their classes later the same day, suggesting the importance of sleep schedules and circadian rhythms on academic performance. Mickey Trockel et al. studied a variety of health variables on GPA in the article, “Health-related Variables and Academic Performance Among First-Year College Students: Implications for Sleep and Other Behaviors” published in the Journal of American College Health in 2000, and found that sleep habits had the most significant effect (of the variables that were tested) on receiving higher GPAs.

One explanation of sleep’s effect on GPA might be explained by Pierre Marquet’s 2001 article, “The Role of Sleep in Learning and Memory” published in Science. He found that sleep allows memories to be consolidated and may even enhance the synthesis of brain proteins, both valuable processes for memory and learning tasks. M Gradisar et al. conducted a study particularly gauged at working memory in their project “Adolescent Sleep and Working Memory Performance” published in Sleep and Biological Rhythms in 2008. The authors found a link between working memory performance and poor sleep, by conducting tests that required participants to remember a sequence and then answer a question by changing the order of the sequence in some way. This more complex form of memory was found to be more sensitive to sleep loss than simpler tasks done in other studies.

Sleep loss contributes to many other problems, as Shih-Yu Lee, PhD, et al, found in their study “Stress and Sleep Disturbances in Female College Students” published in the American Journal of Health Behavior in 2013. The authors specifically studied women and found that their reported stress levels were associated with the amount of sleep loss, and that poor sleep contributed to fatigue, depression, and other physical symptoms. Samantha Clickenbeard et al. focused specifically on children in the study “Sleep and Delinqunicy: Does the Amount of Sleep Matter?” seen in the Journal of Youth & Adolescents in 2011. The authors acknowledge that there are many factors in delinquency, but they did find that adolescents who got less than 7 hours of sleep were significantly more involved in property delinquency.

Plan to Collect Information

Most of the sources I have collected so far are from online databases such as Academic Search Premier and JSTOR. These databases have given me great results and I plan to find a few more articles as well. The National Sleep Foundation website is also a great resource for my project. They publish yearly polls and synthesize the raw data for readers to understand. I will need to read through them carefully to find the information specifically related to my project. The advantage of this website will provide another survey of our nation and give me more variety within my works cited. I also found a few books that could potentially be helpful, (such as Sleep Thieves by Stanley Coren) but they were not available from my library. The book is cheap buying a used version online, so if I can’t find it or something similar anywhere else, that will work fine. Further, I am hoping to find a good chart or graph to bring in an eye-catching visual to support my position.

Project Timeline

I still need more sources to support my thesis, so this coming week I will spend some more time working with online databases, and also reviewing some library materials. My annotated bibliography is due May 18, so that will be my next project. My literature review discussing twenty sources is due the following week, May 25. I plan to start working on annotating and reviewing each source as I collect it, so hopefully these assignments won’t feel so big when I get to them. My final draft of my outline, rationale, and abstract are due June 1. I will start drafting then, and the in progress draft is due June 8. The final paper is due June 14. (Each due date has been moved one day earlier than what is the actual date… I do this to motivate myself to begin things sooner).

Working Bibliography

Bin, Yu Sun, Nathaniel S. Marshall, and Nick Glozier. "Sleeping at the Limits: The Changing Prevalence of Short and Long Sleep Durations in 10 Countries." American Journal of Epidemiology 177.8 (2013): 826-33. Academic Search Premier. Web. 25 Apr 2015.

Carrell, Scott E., Teny Maghakian, and James E. West. “A's from Zzzz's? The Causal Effect of School Start Time on the Academic Achievement of Adolescents.” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 3.3 (2011): 62-81. JSTOR. Web. 11 May 2015.

Clickinbeard, Samantha, et al. "Sleep and Delinquency: Does the Amount of Sleep Matter?" Journal of Youth & Adolescence 40.7 (2011): 916-30. Academic Search Premier. Web. 24 Apr. 2015.

Gradisar, M., et al. "Adolescent Sleep and Working Memory Performance." Sleep and Biological Rhythms 6.3 (2008): 146-54. Academic Search Premier. Web. 25 Apr 2015.

Kelly, William E., Kathryn E. Kelly, and Robert C. Clanton. "The Relationship Between Sleep Length and Grade-Point Average Among College Students." College Student Journal 35.1 (2001): 84. Academic Search Premier. Web. 26 Apr 2015.

Lee, Shih-Yu, et al. “Stress and Sleep Disturbances in Female College Students.” American Journal of Health Behavior 37.6 (2013): 851-58. EBSCOHost. Web. 11 May 2015.

Maquet, Pierre. “The Role of Sleep in Learning and Memory.” Science, New Series 294.5544 (2001): 1048-52. JSTOR. Web. 11 May 2015.

Sadeh, Avi, Reut Gruber, and Amiram Raviv. “The Effects of Sleep Restriction and Extension on School-Age Children: What a Difference an Hour Makes.” Child Development 74.2 (2003): 444-55. JSTOR. Web. 30 Apr 2015.

Trockel, Michey T., Michael D Barnes, and Dennis L. Egget. “Health-Related Variables and Academic Performance Among First-Year College Students: Implications for Sleep and Other Behaviors.” Journal of American College Health 49.3 (2000): 125-31. EBSCOHost. Web. 11 May 2015.

Wolfson, Amy R., and Mary A. Carskadon. “Sleep Schedules and Daytime Functioning in Adolescents.” Child Development 69.4 (1998): 875-87. JSTOR. Web. 11 May 2015.