Larks and Owls: How Sleep Habits Affect Grades

Image Source / Corbis

From Time:

There are at least a few in every college dorm: students who seem to exist in their own time zone, in bed hours before everyone else and awake again at daybreak, rested and prepared for the morning's first lecture.

Sleep researchers refer to these early risers as larks (midnight-oil-burners are known as owls), and new data presented this week at the annual Associated Professional Sleep Societies suggest that a student's preferred sleeping schedule has a lot to do with his or her grade-point average in school. In one study, psychologists at Hendrix College in Arkansas found that college freshmen who kept night-owl hours had lower GPAs than early birds. Another group at the University of Pittsburgh revealed that poor sleep habits among high-schoolers led to lower grades, particularly in math.

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