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Anne Marie Owens

National Post (Canada)

Thursday, September 26, 2002

Gannett News Service

Younger students fare better than teens with early morning classroom schedules, a new study says.

 Scientists have come up with an explanation for why teenagers and early-morning classes are a fundamental mismatch, something most parents know intuitively: Teens are only following an internal body clock that puts them at odds with a traditional school schedule.

 The Canadian researchers suggest adolescents would be better off if classes started at noon.

 The study, which plots the time of day children prefer at different ages, actually pinpoints when children's circadian phase shifts from a morning preference to a preference for evenings: at 12.91 years, or the age of 13.

 "Our main finding -- a circadian phase shift toward evenings with age – has an important implication for education," the University of Toronto researchers say in their paper, Children's Time of Day Preference. They suggest teenagers whose internal clocks are out of sync with an early-morning start time may be essentially sleepwalking their way through much of their school day, and only "become more alert in the afternoon, when school is almost over."

 Sunghan Kim, the lead author of the study and a post-doctoral researcher in the university's psychology department, says it would be preferable for teenagers to be taught at their optimal time.

 "Since children's time-of-day preference shifts toward eveningness as they get older, their cognitive functioning is likely to be at its peak more toward the afternoon than in the morning," he writes. "Thus, if important basic classes such as reading and mathematics are taught in the morning, older school children will be learning this critical material at their less-preferred, non-optimal time of day, resulting in a poorer school performance."

 The study, to be published in the upcoming issue of the journal Personality and Individual Differences, suggests that this circadian shift can affect teenagers' school performance in detrimental ways. One consequence is the sleep deprivation that results as teenagers go to bed and rise later, at the same time as the school system sets classes ever-earlier. (An eight-year-old, for example, may begin her school day at 9 a.m., while a 16-year-old, who prefers evenings to early mornings, could begin his day as early as 7:30 a.m.)

 Another downside is that teenagers simply may not be capable of their best academic performance at the time the school system has to accommodate them.

 Previous studies have found that adults of all ages perform much better at their optimal time of day on a number of cognitive tasks, such as memory performance, ability to focus and control over "strong but inappropriate responses."

 Dr. Kim's study is the first major North American examination of this concept in youngsters. Researchers surveyed 989 American students, an equal number of boys and girls, ranging in age from 8 to 16. All of the children attended schools or academic programs in the area around Durham, N.C., where Dr. Kim began his research as a PhD student.

 To gauge the students' attitudes toward sleep and school performance, researchers adapted the standard questionnaire used in this field of study to a 10-question, child-friendly survey.

 Previous research has established that adults shift to a preference for mornings at about 50 years of age, but there was less knowledge about these trends in children.

 Researchers found that the statistical "break point" when children shifted from a morning to evening preference occurred quite clearly at 12.9 years.

 They found no differences in the time or clarity of this break point between boys and girls.

 aowens@nationalpost.com