Sleep and Sadness as the Routes to Success

If you're a provider, you want your learners to do well.    You're alert to any new insight from research that might help.

So here's a couple of tips you might have missed.

Number one?    Sleep.

Most misguided students study deep into the night, sustained only with gallons of black coffee.

But it doesn’t work    Late nights, it seems, are counterproductive.    Sacrificing sleep for extra study produces a poorer academic performance.    Learners need sleep to “lay down" what they’ve learnt, or it slips out as easily as it slipped in.

So, one way to support your learners might be to tell them to get more sleep.

And number two?    Make 'em sad.

Improbable?    Sounds it.    But, according to a story in TES last year, “new research suggests that children who feel sad are more likely to do well in exams than children who are happy”.

Why?    Well, it's all about attentiveness.    “Happy children found it much harder to pay attention to detail than those who were made to feel sad.    As a result, they performed much worse in the test.”    And since we're all kids at heart ...

So, are all those “good luck cards” and messages of encouragement actually counterproductive?    Would a supply of “good grief, you haven't a chance” messages be more to the point?

Perhaps.    Yet, as TES points out, the conclusion from previous research seems to confirm that “children who feel welcome and listened to at school are more likely to be academically successful . . . [whereas] students who are anxious, angry or depressed don't learn”.

Perhaps the answer is to tell them how great they’re doing throughout the course, thus maximising learning, and then, just before the exam, tell them you've been lying all the time.    That would get the best of both worlds.    Mind you, it would be a brave tutor who tried it.

5th February, 2009
Sources: Quodlibs 299

Links

Sadness (retrieved 05-02-09)
Sleep (retrieved 05-02-09)

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