19 extra minutes of sleep helped students perform better in class, study finds

A new study suggests that adding an extra 19 minutes of sleep per night to college students' routines can lead to tangible improvements in their academic performance. Published in the Journal of Political Economy, the research conducted by health economist Osea Giuntella from the University of Pittsburgh is the first field experiment to establish a causal relationship between better sleep and academic achievement.

The study involved 1,149 college students who were typically sleeping an average of 6.6 hours per night. On nearly 29% of weeknights, students slept for less than six hours, indicating a significant sleep deprivation problem among the participants. To address this issue, students were given Fitbit wearable devices to monitor their sleep and were randomly assigned to two groups.

The treatment group received personalized bedtime reminders and a $4.75 financial incentive for each night they achieved at least seven hours of sleep, while the control group also wore the devices but without any specific instructions or rewards. The intervention led to a 26% increase in the proportion of nights the treatment group met the seven-hour target, resulting in an overall 19-minute increase in nightly sleep duration.

This extra sleep persisted even after the incentives ended, with students sleeping about eight minutes longer per night compared to their baseline. The researchers then correlated the additional sleep with students' official university transcripts and found that the intervention improved average course performance by 0.075 to 0.089 grade points during the intervention semester and a similar improvement was observed in the following semester.

Although the academic benefits were modest, the study highlights the potential for simple interventions to be adapted and tested in various settings, including schools and workplaces.