Maybe We Do Need Sleep?

By Seneca Barker


I'm sure we've all had a teacher that, at one time or another, said, "Make sure you get a good night's rest!" before a big test.

Which I never listened to, and most of the time I stayed up way too late on school nights. So I was usually in class like...

Picture source: www.buzzfeed.com

However, an article I stumbled upon got me thinking, maybe I really did need that sleep?

Scientists are now linking higher amounts of sleep to higher test scores. After an large study of 621 Freshmen at Ghent and KU Leuven University in Belgium, they found that student who generally got a good night's rest preformed better on exams.

The grades of students who slept seven hours or more each night had test scores of, on average, ten percent higher than those who didn't. That's huge, that could've meant the difference between a 4.0 and a 3.0 for some students.

But why is this? After reading this article I learned that new knowledge is integrated into our existing knowledge while we sleep, so the longer we rest, the more we soak up.

So I guess I'll be that teacher telling my class they better get some rest!