A professor at Baylor who oversees the school’s Sleep Neuroscience and Cognition Laboratory is bribing his students to get more sleep more by offering extra credit.
After years of watching his students learn about the detriments of getting little sleep but rarely seeing students change their behavior, professor Michael Scullin decided to do something about it. Students under his tutelage were offered extra credit for sleeping at least 8 hours per night during exam week. Participants were held accountable by sleep monitors.
The extra credit made up about 1 percent of students’ overall class grade and those who got more sleep did better on their exams.
The results of Scullin’s sleep study with students have been recently published in two journals: The Teaching of Psychology and the Journal of Interior Design.
Inside Higher Ed reports, “One student who had a D-plus grade in the class before the final exam but completed the challenge reported back that it was the first time [his] brain worked while taking an exam.”
“Students say, ‘There’s nothing I can do about it,’” says Scullin. “There’s quite a lot you can do it about it, and the first-line treatment is cognitive behavioral therapy, basically just the way you think about sleep and your relationship with sleep.”
Alexander James is a contributor to Red Alert Politics and a freelance journalist.
