The students of the RAS school will study the effect of sleep on school performance
28 January 2022 г. FRC KSC SB RAS
The study will be performed for several weeks. The first part of the experiment is to analyze the effect of daytime sleep on academic performance. Students also want to compare daytime and nighttime sleep. In addition, during the project, it is planned to interview a hundred schoolchildren of Gymnasium No. 13, analyze the results of the survey, identify sleep patterns, and determine the chronotype of schoolchildren. The guys, along with their supervisor have a hypothesis, as it should be in any scientific study. They are testing the hypothesis that the quality, duration, and conditions of sleep affect students’ performance.
Nadezhda Rimatskaya, the curator of a group of students, told in more detail about the idea of their project: “Sleep is a physiological human need, exactly the same as hunger or thirst. For the normal functioning of the nervous system and the whole organism, good sleep is of great importance. It should be sufficiently long and deep (each person has his own rhythm of life, and, accordingly, his own duration of sleep needed).
For thousands of years, people thought that the main function of sleep was rest. However, with the development of technology, scientists have realized that sleep is not a monotonous state, but an active process with many functions. Sleep has such functions as: natural reboot of the whole body, increased protection against bacteria and viruses, improving memory, starting the metabolism, normalizing hormonal levels, etc. We still do not know all the functions of sleep, but the forced or conscious restriction of sleep seriously affects the mental and physical health of a person.
“We chose the topic of sleep because it is one of the most basic human needs. And this is now a hot topic because people now work a lot, study, combine several activities and there is very little time left for sleep. There are 8 of us in the team, and we have assigned roles. Someone prepares questionnaires, but Timofey and I decided to be participants in the experiment,” Daria Kostyleva, an 8th-grade student of the RAS school, shares her impressions of participating in the experiment.
“Sleep affects human activity. If one sleeps little, he will feel worse. His productivity drops. This affects society as a whole. We know that in some Russian schools there is a practice when children sleep during the day. In our experiment, we want to trace the effect of sleep on the performance of children at school,” a student of the same class, Timofey Panko, continues the story.
The guys told what they generally like in the RAS-supported class. Daria is planning to go into medicine, so she is learning how to plan and conduct scientific experiments and finds this to be a very interesting and rewarding experience. Timothy decided to become a scientist because he sees how important science is for our life, he wants to study topics that interest him.
Marina Smolnikova, Candidate of Biological Sciences, project supervisor of the RAS pivotal schools at Gymnasium No. 13, tells about the goal of the RAS school project: “We are planning to raise future scientists. Schoolchildren will learn why science is so fascinating and why it is interesting to make scientific discoveries. In total, three schools in Krasnoyarsk have been participating in this project. In gymnasium No. 13, the team of curators consists of scientists from leading scientific organizations of the city. The organizer of the project is the Federal Research Center of KSC SB RAS, and the specialists from the Siberian Federal University and Krasnoyarsk State Medical University also help us. We have chosen the modern direction as the theme of the project for the gymnasium, that is personalized medicine and the study of genetic predisposition to human diseases. Within this framework, students, under the supervision of their curators, are conducting their own scientific research. The sleep experiment is just a part of this project. We are looking forward to seeing what results they will get. Moreover, we are waiting for these future young scientists in our institutions!
The federal project for supporting schools of the Russian Academy of Sciences has been implemented in Krasnoyarsk for the third year. Next year, the first graduation of schoolchildren from academic classes is planned. The Federal Research Center "KSC SB RAS" supervises the entire project. So far, in our city, specialized scientific classes have been created only in three schools: school No. 10, school No. 7, and gymnasium No. 13. In each of these educational institutions, scientists teach a number of disciplines to schoolchildren of the RAS classes, these children go on excursions to scientific organizations, have the opportunity to get to know each other, and participate in the scientific process themselves. The main goal of the project is to attract young personnel and specialists to science.
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