Does Having a Poor sleep affect your grades?

Everybody knows that if you don’t have a good sleep you will not have a good day. Everything happens to you when you don’t sleep. For example when you are in school you will be all sleepy and you will not be paying attention to class etc. So I made I research about this since I think it is an interesting research. I also made this because I think that this may be a reason of why some students have so low grades.

Sleep and Learning Research
Everyone knows that if you don’t have a good rest time at night, your next day could be ruined. When you are sleepy, you will feel all tired and sleepy and obviously all your day will be ruined.
It is quite obvious that mental functions and learning are the primary victims of having a bad sleep. Scientists have suspected for a long time that the main function of having a sleep is heavily related to learning and memory. For example, in the 17th century, John Locke, an English philosopher, campaigned that children should have a good sleep. This would help children by learning more in school. In the present there are still some famous sleep researchers who argue about this topic. Lots of sleep researchers say that ‘‘sleep is like eating, if you can get more, you will always want to sleep more and more’’. There are people that maybe don’t like sleeping and there are some people that might just love to sleep.
The main thing that may make students sleepy is going to school. First of all, they need to wake up early to go to school to ‘‘learn’’. Being tired and sleepy doesn’t really contribute to have a good school day since it just contributes to sleepiness and distraction. And not just your learning is affected, or it is just a waste of time, not only the kids get all stressed and bored, but even their health could be affected. Some researchers have tried to change school time so students can have a better sleep.

When I read this, I decided to make a research so I interviewed several students. So this where the 2 things that I asked them: what was their actual grade and that how many hours they sleep per day. And these were my final results:

Name of Boy / Hours of Sleep /Grade
GGV / 7 / 74
MSF / 8 / 75
FAJ / 8 / 72
LACF / 7 / 79
ERA / 7 / 75
HJG / 8 / 74
TNS / 6 / 70
RARS / 6 / 72
PGL /7 / 76
JRC /8 / 88
TBC /9 / 85
AEM /8 / 80
JJB /7 / 92
MAOQ / 8 / 96
EMG /8 / 75
JLM /8 / 82
FIRP (me) /8 / 88

I also searched for a research in internet that was already done and this was what I found:
Doctors, nurses and other health care providers never forget to remind teachers, principals and other school professionals that children and adolescents can only learn in a good way if they are healthy. But how true is this?
In a series of six recently-published articles, the relationship between children’s actions in school and various health problems was examined. In each of these articles, the authors read numerous published research studies to look for thing about lots of different things. Of all the health problems researched, having a poor sleep was among the most unexpected and definitive causes of poor academic knowledge.
Most children need at least nine hours of good sleep each night. However, for many reasons, children that go to school may receive less than the recommended time of sleep. The reasons for this shortfall include the working, eating, and bedtime patterns of students and their families, early school-start times, and childhood sleep disorders (such as disrupted sleep from snoring or breathing pauses).
Many adolescents and pre-adolescents (more than 40%, in many research studies) do not get good amounts of sleep. In one study of 1,000 students (grades 9-12), 90% reported feeling tired from lack of sleep etc... And there is evidence that tiredness affects school performance.
Ways to improve your sleeping
Some ways to improve your sleeping are:
• Follow a consistent bedtime routine.
• Establish a relaxing setting at bedtime.
• Get a full night's sleep every night.
• Avoid foods or drinks that contain caffeine, as well as any medicine that has a stimulant, prior to bedtime.
• Do not stay up all hours of the night to "cram" for an exam, do homework, etc. If after-school activities are proving to be too time-consuming, consider cutting back on these activities.
• Keep computers and TVs out of the bedroom.
• Do not go to bed hungry, but don't eat a big meal before bedtime either.
• Avoid any rigorous exercise within six hours of your bedtime.
• Make your bedroom quiet, dark and a little bit cool.
• Get up at the same time every morning.
Things that might not let you sleep

There are lots of things that might not let you sleep but I just researched this 3: Narcolepsy, Insomnia, and sleep apnea.

Narcolepsy is one type of sleep disorder. Narcolepsy is characterized by sleeping a lot during the day, in which a person experiences extreme tiredness and possibly falls asleep in not very appropriate hours, like when you are working or even when you’re ate school. A person that suffers narcolepsy will not have a normal time at sleeping. Narcolepsy is often confused with another sleep disorder called Insomnia. When a person with narcolepsy falls asleep they will generally experience the REM stage of sleep within 10 to 30 minutes. This might often happen to students at school that might not had a good sleep time.
‘‘Insomnia is a symptom which can accompany several sleep, medical and psychiatric disorders, characterized by persistent difficulty falling asleep and/or staying asleep despite the opportunity. Insomnia is typically followed by functional impairment while awake. Both organic and non-organic insomnia without other cause constitute a sleep disorder, primary insomnia. One definition of insomnia is "difficulties initiating and/or maintaining sleep, or non restorative sleep, associated with impairments of daytime functioning or marked distress for more than 1 month."
According to the United States Department of Health and Human Services in the year 2007, approximately 64 million Americans regularly suffer from insomnia each year. Insomnia is 1.4 times more common in women than in men’’.

Sleep apnea is another type of sleep disorder characterized by pauses in your breathing during sleep. Each pause, called an apnea , can last long enough so that one or more breaths are missed, and such pauses or episodes occur repeatedly throughout sleep. ‘‘The standard definition of any apneic pause includes a minimum 10 second interval between breaths, with either a neurological, a blood oxygen desaturation of 3-4% or greater, or both arousal and desaturation’’. Sleep apnea is diagnosed with an overnight sleep test called polysomnogram, which is just a sleep study.


Why is sleeping important

Your body is like a battery. And you use the energy of the battery during all the day. So obviously there needs to be a way to charge this battery. This way of charging the battery that is the energy of your body is by sleeping. Sleeping also helps taking stress away. Stress takes away your focus, stifles creativity, and can contribute to poor sleep
FIRP