Abstract
Sleep helps the consolidation of declarative memories in the laboratory, but the pro-mnemonic effect of daytime naps in schools is yet to be fully characterized. While a few studies indicate that sleep can indeed benefit school learning, it remains unclear how best to use it. Here we set out to evaluate the influence of daytime naps on the duration of declarative memories learned in school by students of 10–15 years old. A total of 584 students from 6th grade were investigated. Students within a regular classroom were exposed to a 15-min lecture on new declarative contents, absent from the standard curriculum for this age group. The students were then randomly sorted into nap and non-nap groups. Students in the nap group were conducted to a quiet room with mats, received sleep masks and were invited to sleep. At the same time, students in the non-nap group attended regular school classes given by their usual teacher (Experiment I), or English classes given by another experimenter (Experiment II). These 2 versions of the study differed in a number of ways. In Experiment I (n = 371), students were pre-tested on lecture-related contents before the lecture, were invited to nap for up to 2 h, and after 1, 2, or 5 days received surprise tests with similar content but different wording and question order. In Experiment II (n = 213), students were invited to nap for up to 50 min (duration of a regular class); surprise tests were applied immediately after the lecture, and repeated after 5, 30, or 110 days. Experiment I showed a significant ~10% gain in test scores for both nap and non-nap groups 1 day after learning, in comparison with pre-test scores. This gain was sustained in the nap group after 2 and 5 days, but in the non-nap group it decayed completely after 5 days. In Experiment II, the nap group showed significantly higher scores than the non-nap group at all times tested, thus precluding specific conclusions. The results suggest that sleep can be used to enhance the duration of memory contents learned in school.
Highlights
There is an increasing interest in understanding the importance of sleep for academic performance in children and adolescents
All the three groups in Experiment II displayed a significant decrease in test scores after 5 days (P = 0.006): 71.7 ± 2.2 for the nap group; 66.8 ± 2.3 for the game class group; and 65.3 ± 2.0 for the regular class group
We investigated whether daytime naps can benefit declarative learning by adolescents in the school setting
Summary
There is an increasing interest in understanding the importance of sleep for academic performance in children and adolescents. Together, delayed sleep phase syndrome, sleep habits and early starting times for school are responsible for promoting sleep deprivation in adolescents; and increase daytime sleepiness, attention and emotional problems, difficulties in memorization and concentration, and poor school achievement (Gianotti et al, 1992; Sousa et al, 2007; Beijamini and Louzada, 2012). This situation is not very different when it comes to children, whose typical school times and extracurricular activities reduce opportunities for daytime naps that are common among preschoolers. Changes in the sleep-wake cycle are thought to jeopardize school learning in two ways: they reduce the capacity for new learning, and impair the consolidation of what has already been learned (Louzada et al, 2008)
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