Study, Sleep, Sickness and Success

The Latest on Study, Sleep, Sickness and Success
 

The recent wisdom on learning using technology tells us that we should all get with it, get laptops, get tablets, learn more and better.   We are just an iPAD from true success - some educators would have us believe.  But this is now disproven.  It just doesn’t happen.  Your grandmother could have told you to get plenty of rest, particularly when you are sick.  Grandma’s folk-wisdom/folk- medicine is now confirmed!  Finally, when you tell your students to study hard for the big exam, and that their success and even future depend on it.  Just a little scare to get them motivated to hit the books, you think.   Indeed, don’t depend on the veracity of your good advice.  It’s just plain wrong!

·         SLEEP AWAY YOUR ILLS.  A good night's sleep really CAN make you feel better: Researchers say long naps can boost immune system and help fight infection – if you are a fruit fly anyway.  Two researchers, led by Julie Williams from the Perelman Institute of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania studied the benefits of sleep to combat infection.   Their findings appear online in two related papers in the journal Sleep, in advance of print editions in May and June.

In the second of these papers, the researchers manipulated sleep through a genetic approach. They used the drug RU486 to induce regulated sleep patterns. Compared to a control group, flies that were induced to sleep more, and for longer periods of time for up to two days before infection, showed substantially greater survival rates. The flies with more sleep also showed faster and more efficient rates of clearing the bacteria from their bodies.   It seems increased sleep somehow helps to boost the immune response by increasing resistance to infection and survival after infection.

For us,  the take-out message with supporting data  is this:  When you get sick, you should sleep as much as you can.

·         SCARING STUDENTS.  Scare tactics DON'T work at school: Fear of failure leads to lower exam scores, study reveals     The study, led by Edge Hill University in Lancashire, looked at different styles of pre-exam persuasive messages used by teachers     It found teachers who used scare tactics to motivate students ahead of exams had a negative effect on their success

The Scare Tactic: Do Fear Appeals Predict Motivation and Exam Scores? was published in School Psychology Quarterly, an academic journal of the American Psychological Association.

·         LAPTOPS.  U.S. scientists recently found that taking notes using a laptop could be harmful to academic performance as they encourage ‘mindless transcription’.  They found that students putting pen to paper displayed a better grasp of concepts that they had just learned.  Pam Mueller of Princeton University and Daniel Oppenheimer of UCLA studied college students in classrooms where some used laptops and others traditional notebooks.   The researchers also found that longhand note takers still beat laptop note takers on recall one week later when participants were given a chance to review their notes before taking the recall test. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. See,  http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/take-notes-by-hand-for-better-long-term-comprehension.html

On a weekly basis we hear of one district or another, one state or another, catching the spirit and “going digital.”  Laptops for all! These finding refute conventional wisdom, or more precisely conventional popularity, trends, or hysteria.