The objective of this study is to determine to what degree sleep disturbances predict academic success, relative to other known risk factors for decreased academic performance.
We performed regression analyses on data from the Spring 2009 American College Health Association National College Health Assessment II dataset (n=55,322 students) to isolate the relative contribution of the frequency of sleep problems in the previous week to GPA and the likelihood of withdrawing from a course. In our estimations, we also controlled for other factors that influence academic success such as demographic and academic variables, drug and alcohol use, perceived stress, and employment hours.
Sleep disturbances were found to be a significant independent predictor of academic problems; on average, each additional day per week that a student experienced sleep problems raised the probability of dropping a course by 10% and lowered the cumulative GPA by 0.02. Factors such as stress, binge drinking, marijuana and other illicit drug use, which typically receive more attention by university administrators, had similar or relatively smaller negative associations with academic success as compared to disturbed sleep. Approximately three quarters of students surveyed reported never receiving information about sleep from their university.
Sleep education represents an underutilized opportunity for universities to maximize retention rates and academic success.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 113. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 01 September 2022.
All research outputs
#462,259
of 33,087,078 outputs
Outputs from Sleep Health
#87
of 858 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#7,753
of 363,441 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Sleep Health
#2
of 22 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 33,087,078 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 98th percentile: it's in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 858 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 59.2. This one has done well, scoring higher than 89% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 363,441 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 97% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 22 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 90% of its contemporaries.
