Research suggests that Sleep Efficiency can affect your child's Math and Language Grades. But why does this happen? Does it apply to all learning? And how to address it? What indeed is Sleep Efficiency? 

Importance of Sleep

Sleep supports neurocognitive functioning (Dewald, Meijer, Oort, Kerkhof, & Bogels, 2010) so poor sleep can undermine neural development. It can also affect emotional regulation, processing speed and working memory, all of which can hamper learning. 

Experts believe that children aged 5 to 10 years old should get between 9 to 10 hr sleep, while older children should get at least 8 hr (Biggs et al., 2011). Sleep deprivation, has been found to increase reaction times when accessing working memory for simple verbal and arithmetic tasks (Jiang et al., 2011), as well as altering one’s mood and stress levels (Owens, 2014).

Sleep Efficiency

​Sleep Efficiency (SE) is Total Sleep time (TST) divided by Time in Bed (TIB) or rather time allocated to Sleep. Sleep Efficiency captures a core problem for those with insomnia - too much time in bed trying to sleep compared to actual sleep. 

A Canadian study suggests that Math (and even Language) grades especially can be affected by Sleep Efficiency. 

Why does this happen though? Another research paper by Dr. Guillermo J. Farfan tries to answer this - 

At its most basic level, mathematical thinking draws from many of the same cognitive resources that are available for thought processes in general (Phillips, 2014; Tall, 2013), such as symbolic and non-symbolic reasoning (Matejko &
Ansari, 2017), visuospatial memory (Verdine et al., 2017), and language (Dehaene et al., 1999). Consequently, long-term development of mathematical proficiency is likely dependent on a subtle interplay of many cognitive and non-cognitive factors without relying on a fixed knowledge structure (Howes et al., 2019; Kilpatrick et al., 2001; Tall, 2013; cf. Schneider & McGrew, 2012).

Among the various cognitive processes underlying proficiency in mathematics (Schoenfeld, 1985), three, in particular, are thought to be closely associated with sleep: memory, attention, and executive functioning (Raghubar et al., 2010;
Schmitt et al., 2017).

In simple words - Math learning success relies on the child's memory, attention and executive functioning processes - and all of these are hampered by poor sleep efficiency. As such, poor sleep efficiency directly affects Math learning. 

Another research paper suggests that kids with relatively high intelligence may not reach their academic achievement potential when they experience sleep problems, and especially poor sleep efficiency. 

There is another process at play - Sleep actually helps consolidate the learnings of the day into long-term memory. As such, poor sleep not only affects learning on the next day due to poorer memory, attention and executive functioning - it can also impact retention of material learnt on the previous day, which is a double whammy. 

How to improve Sleep Efficiency?

The most obvious recommendation here is to allow kids to sleep enough hours at night. While this might seem straightforward, there might be practical challenges, such as a fixed time to get up in the morning to go to school. 

Also - just hours in bed trying to sleep is not enough. Sleep quality matters too and so, parents need to ensure their child gets a better quality sleep with high sleep efficiency. 

Some suggestions to improve Sleep Hygiene and Sleep Quality - 

  • Avoid caffeinated or sugary items in the evenings. While caffeine should be strictly off limits to kids (and it can be in items you don't expect - such as chocolate), sugary items are responsible for blood sugar fluctuations which also makes good sleep difficult. 
  • Avoid screen time in the evening, even educational screen time such as Monster Math. 
  • Avoid oversleeping on non-school days. Paradoxically, this can actually make it more difficult to sleep on regular days and also doesn't make up for the sleep deficit on regular school days. 
  • Keep the bedroom cool, dark and quiet. 
  • Get enough exercise - kids need at least 1 hour of physical activity to be able to sleep well. At the same time, avoid vigorous physical activity 2 hours before bed time.​

There are many other resources suggesting how to improve your child's quality of sleep - and factors such as stress or bad memories can also affect sleep quality, so the steps to be taken can be quite unique to your circumstances. However, it is clear that helping your child sleep better is one of the biggest steps you can take, as a parent, to help your child learn better. 

Summary

Parents who are involved in their kids studies often focus on learning material, instruction, even techniques to help their kids learn better. Sleep quality though plays an equally important role and getting into good sleep discipline can lay a stronger foundation for the child to have better cognitive functioning through the day. 

This can impact learning outcomes for all subjects, but especially so for Math which is especially cognitively demanding compared to other subjects.