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 The study team used a university computer system to follow nearly
15,000 students' daily rhythms and activities over two years. They
found that bigger differences between an individual's class schedule
and their natural "chronotype" - morning lark, night owl or in
between - were tied to poorer academic performance.
"Social jetlag is the misalignment between an individual’s circadian
clocks and their environment due to social impositions like work or
school," said study coauthor Aaron Schirmer of Northeastern Illinois
University in Chicago.
"For example, a late-type student who needs to wake up for an 8 a.m.
class twice per week is most likely socially jetlagged," he told
Reuters Health in an email.
Schirmer and coauthor Benjamin Smarr of the University of
California, Berkeley, initially wanted to test the hypothesis that
late-type students would perform better in evening classes.
"As we continued to analyze the data it became clear that these data
could also be used to measure amounts of social jetlag in large
student populations. Our recent paper combined these two ideas," he
said.
As described in Scientific Reports, the team analyzed login
information from Northeastern Illinois University's online learning
management system servers between 2014 and 2016 to generate daily
activity profiles for 14,896 students.
"We were looking for a cheap and simple way to screen the activity
patterns of a lot of students while they engaged in academic
activities. LMS logins were a perfect solution," Schirmer said.
The data were generated "independent of any study, without recourse
to questionnaires or personal logging through diaries or wearable
sensors, and without the associated limitations (cost, human-power,
etc.) and biases (recall, inclusion, self-selection, etc.)," he
noted.
"These data also represent time spent specifically on
academically-targeted efforts of some sort. This makes these digital
records qualitatively different from other data-mining efforts, such
as analyses of data scrubbed from social media sources, as in
Twitter or Facebook, where the content and timing are primarily
social," he said.
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The researchers analyzed class schedules, what times LMS users
logged in and what they did on days when they had classes and days
when they didn't.
They found that about 4,000 students were naturally more active
earlier in the day than average and 3,400 were inclined to be active
much later than average. Only 40 percent seemed to have body clocks
that were naturally synchronized with their academic schedules.
As a result, 60 percent of students experienced a daily social
jetlag of at least 30 minutes, the study found. This effect was
associated with worse grade-point averages, particularly among the
night owls who took classes at times earlier than they would
naturally be most active.
The study doesn't prove that social jetlag causes poorer
performance, but the authors think their approach could be used by
administrators to assess class scheduling or to identify individuals
who might benefit from interventions to mitigate social jetlag.
Social jetlag impacts performance and health, Schirmer said. "As a
father, husband, and professor my life can often become chaotic
creating a very unstable schedule. I think this is probably true for
most people."
An unstable schedule desynchronizes our internal clocks and impacts
our performance and health. Unfortunately, these implications are
often overlooked and underappreciated, he added.
Schirmer said he hopes the findings "will help the average person be
aware, and hopefully take advantage, of their own biological rhythms
to lead a healthier life."
SOURCE: https://go.nature.com/2GAdmBq Scientific Reports, online
March 29, 2018
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