The Role of Sleep in Children's Academic Performance

来自纵向、横断面和干预性研究的证据表明，睡眠与学业成绩相关。更长、更有效的睡眠与更好的成绩单成绩和更高的标准化成绩测试分数有关。虽然很明显，睡眠与儿童的学业成绩有关，但其潜在机制仍不清楚。我的研究计划的长期目标是了解睡眠在儿童认知中的作用。拟议研究计划的短期目标是长期目标的一个子部分，旨在确定睡眠与学业成绩之间关联的潜在机制。这项研究的基本原理是，它将使我们能够描述睡眠和学习成绩之间相互作用的机制，并解释为什么睡眠的个体差异与学习成绩的差异有关。我们计划通过采用神经心理学和行为学技术进行一系列实验研究来实现我们的目标，这些研究将用于描述睡眠和学业成绩之间相互作用的机制。 拟议的工作将在有利于成功完成的研究环境中进行，我们将采用先进的客观方法来测量儿童自然环境中的睡眠，从而克服该领域以前的方法学挑战。我们以前的工作证明了所提出的工作的可行性。此外，我们特别准备进行拟议的研究，因为我们的研究计划具有获得明确结果所需的专业知识和经验的范围和广度。我们的工作将产生重要的积极影响，因为我们的研究结果有望显着推进发展神经科学和睡眠研究领域，同时为我们的HQP提供独特的跨学科培训机会。这项工作是创新的，因为它将是第一个测试睡眠时间对神经基质和功能单位的影响的研究项目，这些神经基质和功能单位是学习成绩的基础，并研究睡眠依赖性记忆巩固，慢波睡眠和学习成绩之间的相互作用。这项工作有望为我们优化学生学业成绩的能力开辟新的、以前无法实现的视野，因此将产生广泛的社会影响。

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.