The Role of Sleep in Children's Academic Performance

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Evidence from longitudinal, cross sectional and interventional studies shows that sleep is associated with academic outcomes. Longer and more efficient sleep is associated with better report card grades and with higher scores on standardized achievement tests. While it is evident that sleep is associated with academic outcomes in children, the underlying mechanisms remain unknown. The long-term goal of my research program is to understand the role of sleep in children's cognition. The short-term goal of the proposed research program, which is a subsection of the long-term goal, is to identify the mechanisms underlying the associations between sleep and academic outcomes. The rationale for this study is that it will allow us to delineate the mechanisms underlying the interplay between sleep and academic performance and to explain why individual variations in sleep are related to variations in academic achievement. We plan to accomplish our objective by pursuing a series of experimental studies employing neuropsychological and behavioral techniques that will be used to delineate the mechanisms underlying the interactions between sleep and academic outcomes. The proposed work will be conducted in a research environment that is conducive to successful completion and we will employ advanced objective methodology to measure sleep in the child's natural environment, thus overcoming previous methodological challenges in the field. Our previous work demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed work. Furthermore, we are particularly well prepared to undertake the proposed research, because our research program has the scope and the breadth of the expertise and experience needed to obtain definitive outcomes. Our work will have important positive impacts, because our results are expected to significantly advance the fields of developmental neuroscience and sleep research while offering unique interdisciplinary training opportunities for our HQP. The proposed work is innovative because it will be the first research program to test the impact of sleep duration on the neural substrate and functional units that underlie academic performance and to examine the interaction between sleep-dependent memory consolidation, slow wave sleep and academic outcomes. This work is expected to open new, previously unattainable, horizons in our ability to optimize students' academic achievement, and will thus have widespread societal implications.