Cramming vs. Good Nights Sleep
Are you curious if those all night cram study hours are working? I bet your wondering if they are actually helping or hurting your midterm grade? I’m sure all of us have spent an all-nighter studying for that Chemistry or Economics exam that you just have to do well on because its 50 percent of your grade. Not only are you studying so hard for that A+, but your mental well-being. We all feel pressured to do well in college for many reasons. For that high paying job were promised if we graduate from a top-notch school or what about the assumption that you will have a better future. And for those of you whose parents are paying thousands of dollars for tuition, wouldn’t want to let mom or dad down. The answer is here. June J. Pilcher conducted a study of whether sleep deprivation affects your ability of acing that test if you just would have went to bed earlier.
June J. Pilcher published an article “How sleep Deprivation Affects Psychological Variables Related to College Students Cognitive Performance,” in the Journal of American College Health on November of 1997.
Voluntary sleep deprivation is a common occurrence for many collge students, who often partially deprive themselves of sleep during the week and compensate by increasing their sleep time over the weekend. This pattern of sleep deprivation and rebound becomes more pronounced around examination periods, sometimes resulting in 24 to 48 hours of sleep deprivation. By depriving themselves of sleep, college students are not only increasing their feelings of sleepiness during the day, thus decreasing their ability to pay attention in class, but are also negatively affecting their ability to perform on exams.
The effect of sleep deprivation on psychological variable associated with performance, such as self-reported estimates of attention, effort, and performance, have not been thoroughly investigated. Few studies have examined perceived effort and performance, and the results from those studies have often been contradictory. For example, some researchers have suggested that sleep deprivation may affect the willingness of the individual to put forth the effort to perform well on a task more than the actual ability of the individual to perform.
By contrast, other researchers have concluded that people may realize a decrease in performance levels following sleep deprivation and attempt to overcome this by increasing their effort . However other studies have shown that a perceived increase in...