Good sleep may help adolescents thrive in school

 

A new UC Davis Health study published in Psychological Medicine suggests that when it comes to helping adolescents succeed in school and maintain healthy friendships, sleep may matter more than screen time, exercise or diet. This was particularly true for youth experiencing anxiety, depression or other mental health challenges.

Researchers examined how four lifestyle factors — sleep quality, screen time, physical activity and diet — influenced the relationship between mental health symptoms and academic and social functioning in children ages 10 to 13. They found that sleep was the strongest factor associated with better grades and fewer social problems. Screen time was the second strongest factor.

"This finding surprised us," said Jason Smucny, the study's first author and a computational neuroscientist in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. "We expected sleep to be important, but we didn't expect it to stand out so clearly above other lifestyle factors, particularly screen time.”

Mental health concerns can emerge in adolescence

Adolescence is a critical developmental period when mental health concerns often emerge. Globally, about one in seven adolescents experience a mental disorder, and depression and anxiety are the leading causes of illness and disability among young people.

"Parents, educators and clinicians understandably focus on symptoms like anxiety and depression," said senior author Tara Niendam, professor of psychiatry and executive director of the UC Davis Early Psychosis Programs. "But what often matters most to young people and their families is how those symptoms affect everyday life — how they perform in school, connect with friends and navigate daily challenges. This study suggests that sleep may be one pathway linking mental health to those real-world outcomes."

Better sleep may help youth with mental health problems

Using data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, researchers found that healthy lifestyle habits explained a substantial portion of the relationship between mental health symptoms and school performance.

Sleep was the strongest lifestyle factor linking mental health symptoms to lower grades, accounting for 18.5% of the association with depression, 36.3% with anxiety and 8.3% with psychotic-like disturbances.

Screen time was the second strongest lifestyle factor, accounting for 5% of the association with anxiety, 6.3% of the association with depression and 6.2% of the association with psychotic-like disturbances. Exercise and diet had smaller effects.

The researchers emphasize that healthy lifestyle habits are not a substitute for professional mental health care. However, the findings suggest that sleep may be an important and often overlooked target for helping young people experiencing mental health symptoms.

"What is encouraging is that sleep is something parents and families can address," Niendam said. "While it won't solve every mental health challenge, healthy sleep routines are a practical way to support a child's emotional well-being and day-to-day functioning."

• Read the study

Incentives to sleep boost college students’ grades

 

A study published in the Journal of Political Economy, one of the world’s top economics journals, provides the first causal evidence that improving sleep can directly enhance academic performance. 

In a large-scale field experiment involving more than 1,100 university students in the United States, researchers Osea Giuntella (Pitt), Silvia Saccardo, Carnegie Mellon (CMU), and Sally Sadoff, (UC San Diego) tested whether small monetary incentives could help students build better sleep habits, and whether those habits would translate into higher grades. 

Students Were Severely Sleep-Deprived 

At baseline, students slept an average of 6.6 hours per night. Only 43% met the recommended minimum of seven hours on weeknights. More than 85% of participants failed to get seven hours of sleep on at least one school night each week. About half of students went to bed after 1:00 a.m. on average, and one in four went to bed after 2:00 a.m. 

An Ambitious, Technology-Enabled Design 

The study combined objective sleep tracking using Fitbits with a custom-built smartphone app that delivered bedtime reminders, real-time feedback, and immediate digital payments. The app allowed the researchers to monitor engagement, track syncing behavior, and test how different combinations of cues, feedback, and incentives affected both short-term sleep and longer-term habits. 

In addition, participants completed weekly surveys on time use, mental health, and cognitive performance, including tests of creativity and quantitative problem-solving. This rich dataset allowed the researchers to identify how changes in sleep patterns affected students’ daily routines, stress, and academic productivity. 

“This was one of the most comprehensive behavioral field experiments ever conducted on sleep,” said Giuntella. “By integrating wearable technology, real-time incentives, and psychological measures, we were able to observe both the formation of sleep habits and their educational impact.” 

The project builds on the work of the Behavioral Economics Design Initiative (BEDI) and the Pittsburgh Experimental Economics Laboratory (PEEL) at the University of Pittsburgh—two research hubs that bring behavioral insights and experimental methods to real-world challenges in health, education, and technology. 

Incentives for Sleep Work—and Pay Off 

Participants were randomly assigned to receive personalized bedtime reminders, morning feedback, and small cash rewards (about $4.75 per night) for meeting a seven-hour sleep goal, verified through Fitbit trackers. 

The intervention increased the share of nights with seven or more hours of sleep by 26% (about 19 additional minutes of weeknight sleep), with smaller but lasting gains of about 8 minutes per night even after incentives ended. 

Students in the incentive group also earned 0.075–0.089 higher grade points that semester—a 0.10–0.11 standard deviation improvement, equivalent to roughly doubling the impact of traditional financial-aid incentive programs, but at less than one-quarter of the cost. 

Freshmen and STEM Students Benefited Most 

The effects on sleep and academic performance were driven primarily by freshmen—a population suddenly out of their parents’ control, and for the first time in charge of managing their time. The benefits were strongest in STEM courses, and in classes held around midday, suggesting that well-rested students perform better in the most cognitively demanding contexts. 

Better Routines, Less Screen Time, Lower Stress 

The program helped students build more regular sleep schedules and cut back on nighttime screen use, including time spent watching videos or browsing the internet. Total study time remained unchanged, but students shifted some studying from late evening to morning hours. 

The intervention did not significantly change average physical activity or end-of-semester mental health scores, but participants reported feeling they were better able to cope with stress during the treatment period. This is consistent with improved sleep quality and regularity. 

A New Model for Supporting Student Success 

“Our results show that helping students sleep more—and sleep better—can boost academic performance just as effectively as traditional academic interventions, but at a fraction of the cost,” said Giuntella. 

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Journal

Journal of Political Economy

DOI

10.1086/740221 

Struggling adolescent readers left behind: Evidence of post-COVID-19 declines

Using data from the MAP Growth National Dashboard, this research brief highlights an urgent challenge in academic recovery: middle school reading.  On average, 6th graders lost ground between 2019 and 2021, during the height of COVID-related school disruptions. But after that, achievement trends began to diverge for students who were already stronger readers before the pandemic began, and students who were struggling.

Despite these encouraging signs of progress, there are consistent and alarming signs that middle school reading test scores have continued to decline following the pandemic. In this brief, the authors dig into the most recent data on adolescent literacy, focusing specifically on how struggling readers have fared compared to higher-achieving students. These persistent declines suggest that recent literacy reforms, which have largely focused on early grades, may not adequately support students whose reading difficulties extend into middle school. 

The authors conclude by highlighting some promising state policies that build on successful early literacy reforms and extend supports into the middle school grades.

Screen use and emotional, behavioral, and social development in children

 Are there cross-sectional and longitudinal associations of screen use with child and adolescent psychosocial development? In this cohort study of 3786 children, after adjustment for family functioning, no significant associations were found between screen use and developmental difficulties at 5 or 10 years of age, and an association with higher difficulties score at 15 years of age were only seen for very high use of electronic games and not other forms of screen use. Early high screen use was associated with greater difficulties at 10 years of age, but this association was not sustained at 15 years of age. Increased screen use was not consistently associated with poorer development, highlighting the limitation of current guidelines solely focusing on duration of screen use.

The full study: 

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2026.26804?guestAccessKey=72cdb23e-762b-4f66-a42a-69ca47969aca&utm_source=for_the_media&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ftm_links&utm_term=080326

A Large-Scale Dropout-Prevention Experiment

 Timely high school completion is a critical step in successful transitions to post-secondary schooling and the labor market. This randomized controlled trial, deployed in two urban, disadvantaged school districts, tests the effectiveness of a mature and comprehensive student-support program on an unusually large scale (n=2,528). 

While overall effects on graduation rates are small and statistically insignificant, exploratory analyses reveal notable variation by site and over time, mirroring heterogeneity in treatment timing and program implementation. 

These findings highlight the challenges of scaling interventions and raise concerns about generalizing results from small-scale, single-site evaluations.

Promising programs

At  Evidence for ESSA  from Center for Research and Reform in Education, Johns Hopkins University:

• Once Early-Reading Program received a Promising evidence rating for two studies: one randomized controlled trial in K-1 and one quasi-experiment in K, both focusing on children scoring below grade-level in literacy. Once Early-Reading Program is a paraprofessional-delivered, school-embedded 1:1 literacy tutoring program.
• Spalding’s The Writing Road to Reading strengthened its evidence with a followup study of 445 below-grade-level students from an earlier study, earning a Promising rating for the Struggling Readers population.

PeerLearning.net: significant impacts on students’ social relationships, problem behaviors, emotional well-being

 

Program Description

PeerLearning.net is a web-based platform that helps teachers design and deliver cooperative learning (CL) lessons with fidelity to best practices across any subject and grade level. Teachers use the platform to build structured small-group lessons from their existing curricula using lesson templates such as jigsaw or group projects. During lesson delivery, the platform manages student grouping and lesson logistics, including distributing materials to student devices, directing activities according to a timed sequence, supporting teacher observations of student taskwork and teamwork, and guiding post-lesson group reflection. PeerLearning.net removes the planning and management tasks that typically prevent teachers from implementing CL with fidelity to best practices. PeerLearning.net is designed for use in standard academic instruction in any subject and can be implemented at any grade level as long as students are capable of reading instructions on their devices (typically 4th/5th grade and up).

Any teacher can use PeerLearning.net, either on their own or in collaboration with colleagues. Lessons developed within PeerLearning.net can be shared with other teachers through the global library, which has hundreds of lessons created by teachers in various subjects throughout middle and high school, including core subjects (e.g., math, social studies, ELA), as well as social-emotional learning (SEL), organizational/study skills, career preparation, and financial literacy.

Program Outcomes

PeerLearning.net has been evaluated in two cluster randomized trials with a combined sample of over 1,500 students in grades 6–9 across 25 middle and high schools in Oregon, Arizona, and Washington during the 2021–22 and 2023–25 school years.

Across both studies, students in PeerLearning.net schools showed significant improvements in social relationships, including peer relations, prosocial behavior, social-emotional skills, and reduced discrimination (average effect size = +0.46). Students also showed significant reductions in problem behaviors, including victimization, bullying, alcohol and substance use, deviant peer affiliation, and peer stress (average effect size = +0.39). In the area of emotional well-being, students in PeerLearning.net schools reported significantly lower anxiety, depression, loneliness, mental health problems, and stress (average effect size = +0.45). In the first study, effects were consistent across sex, race/ethnicity, and grade level, and dosage analyses confirmed that each additional lesson taught produced significant gains on every outcome. The second trial notably found reductions in anxiety and depression using clinical measures (GAD-7 and PHQ-A), strengthening confidence in PeerLearning.net’s impact on adolescent mental health.

Across two randomized trials, PeerLearning.net produced consistent significant impacts on students’ social relationships, problem behaviors, and emotional well-being, earning a Strong rating and a badge for having two studies meeting the Strong standard. Notably, these broad benefits are produced not through a dedicated prevention curriculum but through everyday academic instruction, with PeerLearning.net supporting teachers in implementing structured small-group learning with fidelity to research-based best practices while reducing teacher preparation time and organizational burden during the lesson.

Staffing Requirements

No special staffing is required.

Professional Development/Training

Teachers can typically learn to use PeerLearning.net within 1 hour. Training can be provided to an entire staff, or to an individual teacher, or anything in between.

Technology

PeerLearning.net is 100% Web-based and integrates with Google Classroom. Both teachers and students must have devices (e.g., Chromebooks, tablets).