The Correlation of Sleep and Academic Performance

Abstract

The essence of sleep is to keep life in balance, ensuring that energy used during day time will also be replenished by resting at night. However, when sleep is interrupted and unable to achieve a blissful rest, it may compromise the health and unfolding tasks that teenagers need to accomplish. Young adults need at least 8 to 10 hours of sleep. Thus, grade 12 Science, Technology, Engineering, Agriculture, and Mathematics (STEAM) students from Silliman University Senior High School in the Philippines answered the online questionnaire on sleep deprivation, which correlates with sleep with academic performance. For nearly eight hours, these respondents in school were swamped with several academic tasks even after class hours leaving so little time to sleep.  While this study reveals that sleep deprivation may affect academic performance, the study obtains 95% confidence that respondents show a mean between 6.85 hours and 7.40 hours 6. This indicates the respondents may occasionally lack 1 to 2 hours of sleep from the required average of 8 to 10 hours of rest. Also, it illustrates no linear correlation between the number of hours of sleep and the general average. This further demonstrates that students can sacrifice a portion of their sleep to have their desired grades and be accustomed to the lack of sleep and difficult academic tasks.  Aside from that, 17 respondents are not sleep deprived. At the same time, 70% have partial sleep deprivation where most of their time is spent studying for exams, doing school projects, using social media, and video gaming. The top three outcomes of sleep deprivation are exhaustion, fatigue, and pessimism and succeeded by health risks, as well as a decline in thinking. Thus, to minimize having debt in sleep is to have time management, establish a comfortable sleeping environment, and less time on social media. The study concludes that there is no correlation between sleep and academic performance.