A team of researchers conducted the first study to figure out how the time of nightly sleep early in the semester affects freshmen end-of-semester grade point average (GPA绩点). Using Fitbit sleep trackers, they found that students on average sleep 6.5 hours a night, but bad outcomes accumulate (增多) when students received less than 6 hours of sleep a night. The results can be found in the Feb. 13 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Sleep guidelines recommend teenagers get 8 to 10 hours of sleep every night. Many college students, however, experience irregular sleep.
David Creswell, Professor in Psychology and Neuroscience at the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, led a team of researchers to evaluate the relationship between sleep and GPA. “Animal studies have shown how critical sleep is for learning and memory,” said Creswell. “Here we show how this work translates to humans. The less nightly sleep a first-year-university-student gets at the beginning of the school term predicts lower GPA at the end of the term. Lack of sleep may be hurting students’ ability to learn in their college classrooms.”
The study evaluated more than 600 first-year students across five studies at three universities. The students wore wrist Fitbit devices to track and record their sleep patterns. The researchers found that students in the study sleep on average 6.5 hours a night. More surprisingly, the researchers found that students who receive less than six hours of sleep experienced a pronounced decline in academic performance. In addition, each hour of sleep lost would cause a 0.07 decrease in end-of-term GPA.
“Once you start sleeping below six hours, you are starting to accumulate more and more sleep debt that can do harms to a student’s health and study habits, hurting the whole system,” said Creswell. “Most surprising to me was that no matter what we did to make the effect go away, it still remained.”
“A popular belief among college students is value studying more or partying more over nightly sleep,” said Creswell. “Our work here suggests that reducing nighttime sleep has potential costs for your ability to learn and achieve in college. All in all, there’s real value in paying greater attention to the importance of nightly sleep.”
8. How many hours of sleep received by students a night will cause increasing negative outcomes?
A.6.4 hours | B.5.9 hours | C.8 hours | D.6.5 hours |
9. What does the underlined word “pronounced” in paragraph 4 refer to?
A.practical | B.particular | C.obvious | D.unknown |
10. What can we infer from Creswell’s saying in the last paragraph?
A.Students should sleep more than 6.5 hours at night to get good grades. |
B.To get more achievements, students should reduce nightly sleep as much as possible. |
C.Aiming to achieve success, students should focus on nightly sleep greatly. |
D.Have more parties at night does good for students’ ability to learn and achieve. |
11. Which of the following may serve as the best title of the passage?
A.The Ways To Improve GPA | B.How Does Nightly Sleep Affect Students? |
C.More Sleeping, More Success | D.Nightly Sleep Is Key To Student Success |