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，睡眠与学业成绩有关。更长时间和更有效率的睡眠与更好的成绩单成绩和标准化成就测试的更高分数相关。虽然很明显，睡眠与儿童的学习成绩有关，但其潜在的机制仍不清楚。我的研究项目的长期目标是了解睡眠在儿童认知中的作用。这项拟议的研究计划是长期目标的一部分，其短期目标是确定睡眠和学习成绩之间联系的潜在机制。这项研究的理论基础是，它将使我们能够描绘睡眠和学习成绩之间相互作用的潜在机制，并解释为什么个人睡眠的差异与学习成绩的差异有关。我们计划通过使用神经心理学和行为技术进行一系列实验研究来实现我们的目标，这些技术将被用来描述睡眠和学习结果之间相互作用的潜在机制。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衡量儿童在自然环境中的睡眠，从而克服以前在该领域的方法挑战。我们之前的工作证明了所提出的工作的可行性。此外，我们为开展拟议的研究做好了特别充分的准备，因为我们的研究计划具有获得最终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，因为我们的成果有望显著推动发展神经科学和睡眠研究领域的发展，同时为我们的HQP提供独特的跨学科培训机会。这项拟议的工作具有创新性，因为它将是第一个测试睡眠时间对构成学习成绩的神经底物和功能单位的影响，并检查睡眠依赖记忆巩固、慢波睡眠和学习结果之间的交互作用的研究项目。这项工作预计将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.