For college students, sacrificing sleep for one more chapter, assignment or hour of revision can often feel like a necessary trade-off. But a new study suggests that getting more sleep may itself be a surprisingly effective way to improve academic performance.Researchers studying more than 1,100 college students found that a relatively simple intervention designed to increase weeknight sleep not only helped students sleep longer but was also followed by measurable improvements in their course grades.The finding is significant because previous research has often shown a link between sleep and academic performance without being able to establish whether getting more sleep actually causes students to perform better academically. This new research attempted to answer that question in a real-world college setting.The study, published in the Journal of Political Economy, found that students encouraged to sleep more improved their average course performance, with the academic effect continuing into the following semester.
Students were sleeping less than seven hours a night
The researchers followed 1,149 students across several waves of the experiment. At the beginning of the study, participants were sleeping an average of just 6.6 hours per night. On 29% of weeknights, students were getting fewer than six hours of sleep.To see whether changing that pattern could affect academic outcomes, researchers provided all participants with Fitbit wearable trackers to monitor their sleep.Students were then randomly divided into two groups.The treatment group was encouraged to get at least seven hours of sleep on weeknights. They also received personalised bedtime reminders and could receive a modest cash incentive of $4.75 per night for four weeks if they achieved their sleep target.The control group wore the Fitbit devices but received no instructions or financial incentives to change their sleeping habits.Speaking to ScienceAlert, health economist Osea Giuntella of the University of Pittsburgh explained why the researchers wanted to conduct the experiment.“We were interested in two main questions,” Giuntella told ScienceAlert. “First, could a simple behavioral intervention help students develop healthier and more persistent sleep habits?”He added that the second question was particularly important for education researchers.“Second, while many studies had documented a strong correlation between sleep and academic performance, there was very little causal evidence using wearables and real-world settings showing that improving sleep actually leads to better educational outcomes.”
The students slept more—and their grades improved
The intervention produced a measurable change in students’ sleeping habits.Students in the treatment group increased the proportion of nights on which they achieved the seven-hour target by 26%. Overall, they slept an additional 19 minutes per night during the intervention.The improvement did not disappear completely after the reminders and financial incentives ended. The students continued to sleep more than they had at the beginning of the experiment, although the effect became smaller, falling to about eight additional minutes per night.For the researchers, however, the most important discovery came when they connected the experimental data with students’ official university transcripts.“After the first wave of the study in 2019, we had a good sense that the intervention was improving sleep and that some of the effects persisted after the incentives ended,” Giuntella told ScienceAlert.“But what really convinced us we had an important finding was when we linked the experimental data to students’ official university transcripts and found improvements in GPA.”Students who received the sleep intervention improved their average course performance by between 0.075 and 0.089 grade points during the intervention semester. A similar effect was observed in the following semester.That persistence is particularly interesting from an education perspective. The intervention itself lasted only four weeks, yet the academic improvement was still visible later.
A reminder that studying longer may not always mean studying better
The researchers are careful not to suggest that sleep alone can transform a student’s academic performance. The effects were relatively modest, and the findings need to be replicated in other populations and settings.Still, the study challenges the idea that students necessarily have to choose between sleep and academic success.In fact, the researchers noted that the academic gains were comparable to, or in some cases better than, improvements produced by scholarship-style financial incentive programmes, while the sleep intervention cost considerably less.For students, the message may be simpler than any productivity hack: getting enough sleep could be part of studying effectively, rather than something that comes after studying is finished.Giuntella told ScienceAlert that the simplicity of the approach was one of the findings that excited him most.“What excites me most is that these are relatively simple interventions that could be adapted and tested in many different settings,” Giuntella said. “Not only universities, but potentially schools and workplaces as well.”The study does not mean that every student needs exactly seven hours of sleep to improve their grades. Nor does it suggest that students should abandon revision, practice or other academic strategies.But it does offer something education researchers have been looking for: experimental evidence that changing a student’s sleep behaviour can have consequences beyond feeling more rested.For students accustomed to staying awake late before examinations, the findings offer an intriguing possibility. The extra hour spent sleeping may not be an hour lost from studying after all.
