Use teacher-rated school performance screening alongside sleep surveillance to identify sleepy learners¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · 8 claims (8 for) · 2 studies (2 associational), q3 · 1 of 2 report an effect size · 8 claims rest on one study

Description¶

The article recommends monitoring sleep and its school-performance correlates in the school setting: "The finding emphasized the importance of sleep surveillance and intervention in the school setting." It proposes daytime sleepiness as a practical screening signal because it showed the most consistent relationship with performance, and it supplies a teacher-rated instrument (the TSAF, with subscales for attention, motivation, achievement, and relationships) for that purpose. Schools would survey sleep habits and teacher ratings together to flag children whose sleepiness coincides with impaired performance.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• A validated parent or student sleep questionnaire (the study used the Chinese CSHQ) and a teacher school achievement form with acceptable reliability (TSAF Cronbach's α 0.83 overall).

Constraints¶

• The article notes parental reports of sleep may carry rater bias, though it cites evidence that parental reports and actigraphy were generally in agreement.
• The study had no baseline school performance measure and no IQ measure, limiting interpretation of the sleep-performance association.

Target Learners¶

• School-aged children (roughly 5-12 years) in primary school

Target Learning Goals¶

• Early identification of children whose daytime sleepiness coincides with impaired attention, learning motivation, and academic achievement

Claims¶

• Daytime sleepiness is highly prevalent among Chinese school-aged children, affecting 64.44% (sometimes 37.50%, frequently 26.94%) [+W]
• Delaying school start time by 30 or 60 minutes increased children's sleep duration and reduced daytime sleepiness over two years [+W]
• In the intervention trial, short sleep prevalence fell sharply in delayed-start schools (intervention 2: 40.47% to 11.87%) while sufficient-sleep prevalence remained low overall [+W]
• Frequent daytime sleepiness is associated with impaired academic achievement, attention, and learning motivation in school-aged children [+W]
• Only 22.34% of Chinese school-aged children get sufficient sleep (≥10 hours), while 37.96% have short sleep duration (<9 hours) [+W]
• The association between sleep duration and school performance is nonlinear (p = 0.04) in generalized additive models [+W]
• Short sleep duration (<9 hours) at follow-up is associated with impaired academic achievement, while baseline sleep duration did not significantly predict later school performance [+W]
• Persistent sleep problems (DIMS at both ages 7–9 and 11–13) increase the risk of poor academic performance even after adjusting for mental health, gender, pubertal status and SES [+W]

Related Strategies¶

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Li Shenghui, Arguelles Lester, Jiang Fan, Chen Wenjuan, Jin Xingming, Yan Chonghuai, Tian Ying, Hong Xiumei, Qian Ceng, Zhang Jun, Wang Xiaobin, Shen Xiaoming. (2013). Sleep, School Performance, and a School-Based Intervention among School-Aged Children: A Sleep Series Study in China. PLoS ONE. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0067928