‘ Social jetlag’ linked to lower grades
When work, school and other scheduled activities are out of sync with a person’s body clock, “social jetlag” results and diminishes performance, according to researchers. 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 co- author Aaron Schirmer of Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. “For example, a late- type student who needs to wake up for an 8 am class twice per week is most likely socially jetlagged,” he told Reuters Health in an email.
Schirmer and co- author 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 analyse the data, it became clear that this 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 analysed 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 was generated “independent of any study, without recourse to questionnaires or personal logging through diaries or wearable sensors, and without the associated limitations ( cost, humanpower, etc.) and biases ( recall, inclusion, selfselection, etc.),” he noted.
“These data also represent time spent specifically on academically- targeted efforts. This makes these digital records qualitatively different from other data- mining efforts, such as analyses of data scrubbed from social media sources where the content and timing are primarily social,” he said.
The researchers analysed class schedules, what times LMS users logged in and what they did on days when they had classes and days when they didn’t. 60 per cent of students experienced a daily social jetlag of at least 30 minutes, the study found.