About the speaker:  Dr. Leanne Foster

Leanne brings years of experience as a school administrator, educational consultant and as the parent of a child with ADHD.  Her teaching background extends from Kindergarten to university, and includes work  in special education.  Leanne completed her B.Ed. and M.Ed. from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, and received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto.  Presently, Leanne works as a school administrator for grades 1 through 12, and presents frequently on supporting children with ADHD, anxiety and other needs.  Leanne lives in Toronto with her husband, daughter and very small dog.

When:

Saturday October 26th, 2013 or Saturday November 2nd, 2013
10am – 12 pm

Where: 1407 Yonge Street, Suite 206, Toronto, M4T 1Y7

Phone: (416) 516 – 3379

Email: [email protected]

Cost: $60 per person; 35% discount for spouses/partners

Spaces limited to maximize interactions.

Dr. Foster will also be available for follow-up consultation for families wishing to receive individualized support.

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Whether you’re an athlete, an executive, a student, or a parent, you’re balancing many obligations and demands throughout the week. Staying productive and focused requires effective time management and organizational skills but there’s another proven tactic that many of us have forgotten: the effects of a good night’s sleep.

Sleep reduces stress, increases productivity, helps us maintain a healthy weight and diet, maximizes physical stamina, increases our ability to pay attention, and results in higher test scores. In fact, it’s an essential component of effective learning. Current research shows that adequate sleep is critical for processing information that has been learned during the day. After taking a class, studying, acquiring a new skill, or completing a round of homework, it’s important to get a full night’s rest so that your brain can consolidate and practice what it knows.

It’s a myth that we need less sleep as we get older. What is true, however, is that as a society we sleep less and have trouble waking up to start the day. How much sleep is enough? Children need 10 to 13 hours of sleep each night, adolescents need between eight and 9.25 hours, and adults should aim for seven to nine hours of shuteye.

If you’re having difficulty putting strong sleep habits into practice, try these tips.

References:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/science/brain/a-good-sleep-makes-everyone-sharper-healthier-and-calmer-especially-teens/article8765535/

http://www.spring.org.uk/2013/09/offline-learning-how-the-mind-learns-during-sleep.php

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About the Program

Students who are easily discouraged and find it difficult to stay organized, plan ahead, initiate work and remain on task will benefit from the structure and support of Evoke Study Space, our supervised homework program. This program offers students a quiet space where they can complete homework and upcoming assignments, have access to teaching support, and a support for executive function and self-regulation skills. Our program helps students establish a link between their long-term goals and the daily behaviour they need to perform in order to achieve those goals.

The Evoke Study Space program is designed to help students develop effective routines, complete homework and assignments on time, stay organized and on top of their work, plan ahead, lower feelings of anxiety, and become confident, active learners.  Students learn to take on more responsibility for their learning and become more self-directed.

Skills

The program offers homework and assignment checks, assistance with creating daily and weekly plans for long-term projects, and guidance for allocating study time. Active study skills for tests and exams are outlined and taught. Academic Mentors help students prioritize and adjust their study schedule as necessary, work with them to address challenges as they arise, and show students how to break down assignments into manageable chunks with due dates. Students also receive support in organizing their materials, binders, book bags, backpacks, notes and handouts.

Our Mentors work directly with students to assist them in developing their goal-directed persistence, and sustain their attention and focus on required tasks.  Students learn how to best cope with stress and setbacks, and foster their resiliency.  Evoke Academic Mentors work with students to develop the mental and physical habits they need to foster positive adaptation to stress.

Structure

The program is available Monday through Thursday after school.  Students are welcome and encouraged to attend all four sessions per week, with a minimum commitment of two days a week. Mentors provide guidance, encouragement, and explanations as needed to help students complete their work and assignments.  Snacks are provided or students may bring their own. Students will be encouraged to take supervised breaks during their sessions.

For more information email Denise ([email protected]) for York Region services,

Kate ([email protected]) for Toronto services.

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As summer draws to a close and preparations for September studies begin, academic ambitions fill the air. Ambitions of “trying harder” and “accomplishing more,” are held by adults and adolescents alike, as each resolves to make this new school year better than their last.  Unfortunately, this resolve – similar to that found in the early weeks of January – rarely lasts, and individuals who start the year out strong lapse back into former under-productive routines and habits by Thanksgiving. The academic ambitions that first filled the air come to be replaced by a new sound, a refrain of “How can I motivate myself do better?” And herein lies the problem.

In his book, “Why we do what we do,” psychologist Edward Deci explores the nature of individual motivation and unpacks the components necessary for individuals to become and stay motivated. Motivation, as Deci notes, can come from external sources (i.e., coercion, reward, etc.) or internal ones (an intrinsic desire held by the individual themselves). Attempting to motivate through external means is by far the most common approach employed by parents; “do your chores our you’re grounded,” educators; “do your homework or you’ve got detention,” and even individuals themselves; “if I study for 4 hours, I can hang out with my friends on Friday.” Unfortunately, attempts to motivate through external means are not only woefully ineffective but have also been shown to decrease motivation in individuals. This is because motivation is not something that gets done to people, but rather is something that people do. True motivation that is prolonged and sincere cannot be imposed onto a person but must come from within. Internal or ‘intrinsic’ motivation is more effective and likely to be maintained than external forms, because it allows individuals to engage in action out of a feeling of sincere want instead of obligation, anxiety, or fear. Instead of asking, “How can I motivate myself?” individuals should instead be asking, “How can I foster intrinsic motivation?”

The following are some suggestions that are found to be helpful:

1)Allow for choice

Choice is crucial to self-determination and autonomy. Because of this fact, whether or not we have a say in how we do things goes a long way towards deciding whether or not things get done. When individuals are allowed the ability to choose for themselves the approach taken, they recognize that their sense of autonomy is being respected and engage in action out of a feeling of genuine want and not obligation. Personalizing your approach can make even the most boring and tedious of tasks more pleasurable and, therefore, more likely to be completed.

2)Take Pride in the Process

Too often we measure our progress and accomplishment by largely arbitrary measurements defined by people separate from ourselves. Grades, earnings, personal statistics, and similar numeric assessors are all forms of external motivation and, therefore, largely inefficient. If an individual studies to “get an A” and proceeds to study but only obtains a “B–,” that student is less likely to study as hard for the second test, and will lapse back into old habits. However, should an individual seek to “study more effectively” or “increase the time put to studying by an hour,” they are vastly more likely to maintain and build upon the initial behavior.

3)Make it Personally Meaningful

Regardless of the importance of the task, one will only maintain motivation if they find personal resonance in the pursuit. While carrot-and-stick motivational techniques yield short-term results, their long-term detriment far outweighs any benefit wrought. Rather than force oneself into an ill-fitting pursuit, environment, or ethos it is better to reroute and explore alternative options. This may mean selecting new courses, taking a gap-year, or reframing short and long-term ambitions and the timeline for accomplishing them. Ultimately, no one can make an individual do something they are sincerely opposed to doing. Accepting personal choice and allowing for the freedom to find personal satisfaction in a pursuit is not only requisite to maintaining motivation, but to maintaining happiness as well.

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Ellen Caroll has often asked herself this exact question – especially when it comes to helping her family members get the amount of sleep they need. With a son in preschool and a daughter in high school, a husband who works over 50 hours a week and aging parents, one with Parkinson’s disease, Ellen’s family runs the gamut when it comes to age and sleep needs. Because all of Ellen’s family members have busy schedules, they often forget to put their sleep needs ahead of their other priorities. Not only does Ellen need to convince her family that getting the right amount of sleep is important, but she also needs to figure out how much sleep they really need!

If you’re like Ellen and her family, you’re probably also confused about how to know when “enough is enough” in regards to your sleep. While news media and health organizations are regularly saying to get more sleep, it might be unclear to you how many hours of sleep you should be getting and how to tell if you are adequately rested. Keep reading and we’ll explore how you can make educated decisions about your sleep and that of your family members’.

What the Research Says About Sleep Duration

The first thing experts will tell you about sleep is that there is no “magic number.” Not only do different age groups need different amounts of sleep, but sleep needs are also individual. Just like any other characteristics you are born with, the amount of sleep you need to function best may be different for you than for someone who is of the same age and gender. While you may be at your absolute best sleeping seven hours a night, someone else may clearly need nine hours to have a happy, productive life. In fact, a 2005 study confirmed the fact that sleep needs vary across populations, and the study calls for further research to identify traits within genes that may provide a “map” to explain how sleep needs differ among individuals.

Another reason there is “no magic number” for your sleep results from two different factors that researchers are learning about: a person’s basal sleep need – the amount of sleep our bodies need on a regular basis for optimal performance – and sleep debt, the accumulated sleep that is lost to poor sleep habits, sickness, awakenings due to environmental factors or other causes. Two studies suggest that healthy adults have a basal sleep need of seven to eight hours every night, but where things get complicated is the interaction between the basal need and sleep debt. For instance, you might meet your basal sleep need on any single night or a few nights in a row, but still have an unresolved sleep debt that may make you feel more sleepy and less alert at times, particularly in conjunction with circadian dips, those times in the 24-hour cycle when we are biologically programmed to be more sleepy and less alert, such as overnight hours and mid-afternoon. You may feel overwhelmingly sleepy quite suddenly at these times, shortly before bedtime or feel sleepy upon awakening. The good news is that some research suggests that the accumulated sleep debt can be worked down or “paid off.”

Though scientists are still learning about the concept of basal sleep need, one thing sleep research certainly has shown is that sleeping too little can not only inhibit your productivity and ability to remember and consolidate information, but lack of sleep can also lead to serious health consequences and jeopardize your safety and the safety of individuals around you.

For example, short sleep duration is linked with:

According to researchers Michael H. Bonnet and Donna L. Arand, “There is strong evidence that sufficient shortening or disturbance of the sleep process compromises mood, performance and alertness and can result in injury or death. In this light, the most common-sense ‘do no injury’ medical advice would be to avoid sleep deprivation.”

On the other hand, some research has found that long sleep durations (nine hours or more) are also associated with increased morbidity (illness, accidents) and mortality (death). Researchers describe this relationship as a “U-shaped” curve (see illustration) where both sleeping too little and sleeping too much may put you at risk. This research found that variables such as low socioeconomic status and depression were significantly associated with long sleep. Some researchers argue that these other variables might be the cause of the longer sleep: the fact that individuals with low socioeconomic status are more likely to have undiagnosed illnesses because of poor medical care explains the relationship between low socioeconomic status, long sleep and morbidity/mortality. Researchers caution that there is not a definitive conclusion that getting more than nine hours of sleep per night is consistently linked with health problems and/or mortality in adults, while short sleep has been linked to both these consequences in numerous studies.

“Currently, there is no strong evidence that sleeping too much has detrimental health consequences, or even evidence that our bodies will allow us to sleep much beyond what is required,” says Kristen L. Knutson, PhD, Department of Health Studies, University of Chicago. “There is laboratory evidence that short sleep durations of 4-5 hours have negative physiological and neurobehavioral consequences. We need similar laboratory and intervention studies to determine whether long sleep durations (if they can be obtained) result in physiological changes that could lead to disease before we make any recommendations against sleep extension.”

But a key question is how much is too much or too little. Researchers Shawn Youngstedt and Daniel Kripke reviewed two surveys of more than 1 million adults conducted by the American Cancer Society and found that the group of people who slept seven hours had less mortality after six years than those sleeping both more and less. The group of people who slept shorter amounts and those who slept longer than eight hours had an average mortality risk that was greater, but the risk was higher for longer sleepers. Youngstedt and Kripke argue that for those who would normally sleep longer than eight hours, restricting their sleep may actually be healthier for them, just as eating less than one’s appetite may be healthier in a more sendentary society.

What Your Body is Saying About Your Sleep Needs

After looking at the research, the next step in identifying your sleep need is taking a “snapshot” of your sleeping habits. Ellen began this process by looking qualitatively at each family member’s sleep habits and their behaviors during the day. Here’s what she found:

Her teenage daughter was a lot of fun to be around at night – she was energetic and in high spirits, chatting with her family during dinner, talking on the phone with friends, playing on her computer and squeezing in an hour of TV. Whenever Ellen would try and get her off to bed, she’d complain that she didn’t feel tired. Nevertheless, when her alarm would usher in another day of high school at 6:30 am, Ellen’s daughter Terri was NOT fun to be around. Irritable, tired and unhappy, Terri would head off to school with a bad start to the day, not to mention the fact that she had difficulty staying awake in her classes. What Ellen and Terri may not know is that Terri’s biology and age play a large role in her sleep habits. As a teenager, her circadian rhythms are geared to stay up later in the evening and to wake later in the morning. As a result, a 10 o’ clock bedtime may feel too early to her body, and a 6:30 am wake time certainly doesn’t fit her current sleep/wake schedule. But the biggest problem is that adolescents still need lots of sleep – at least nine hours every night and it is hard to get that much when biology says “stay up late” and school says “start early.”

Ellen never thought that her young son could be sleep deprived. After all, she thought, sleep deprivation occurs when you’re a “night owl” teenager or over-worked adult, not a four year-old! What Ellen may not know is that children need much more sleep than their adult counterparts to be well-rested. Experts estimate that preschoolers (3 to 5 years-old) need 11-13 hours of sleep, while school-aged children up to age 12 need approximately 10-11 hours of sleep. Ellen’s son Josh frequently adapts to his family’s late-night schedule and doesn’t usually take naps – in fact, when he falls asleep in the car, it is usually past his bedtime or the day after getting too little sleep. As a result of “going along with the family routine,” he’s often shortchanged on sleep. Unfortunately, it shows up in whiny behavior and even tantrums that he has otherwise outgrown.

As a mother of two in her forties, Ellen is used to sacrificing her own sleep needs for that of her family’s. She squeezes in a busy day at work and has lots to do around the house, not to mention spending time with her children and husband. By day’s end she feels exhausted, but hasn’t had time to herself and doesn’t want to sleep. As a woman, Ellen has also had unique sleep experiences from those of her family members. Ellen’s sleeping habits have undergone many changes throughout her life. As a pregnant woman her sleep needs changed with each trimester, and she battled common sleep problems during pregnancy such as heartburn, leg cramps and snoring. As Ellen approaches menopause, she will face new sleep challenges like hot flashes and may experience insomnia.

Ellen’s husband Roger is a busy executive who often spends early mornings and late nights working. When he’s not working he’s often thinking about working, and this has led to a lot of insomnia and sleeplessness nights. Roger’s sleep deprivation is starting to show – he has difficulty enjoying time with his family and has lost his desire to exercise as he used to. This pattern forms a vicious cycle because the less Roger sleeps the more likely he is to eat. Research has found links between appetite increase and sleep deprivation due to hormones that are produced when you’re short on sleep. This can not only lead to gaining weight, but his sleep deprivation and weight gain could lead to serious health problems like the onset of sleep apnea, hypertension, heart attack, diabetes and stroke. Roger knows that most adults need 7-9 hours to feel well-rested, but he has trouble “turning off” his mind at the end of the day to get the sleep he needs.

Ellen’s aging father has Parkinson’s disease and faces a number of unique challenges related to his sleep. Regardless of his illness, as an older adult his sleep is different than when he was younger. For example, elderly people tend to spend very little time in deep sleep and are more easily aroused or awakened. Nevertheless, their average total sleep time increases slightly after age 65, but many older adults divide their sleep between daytime naps and nighttime sleep. Napping, though, may decrease the need to sleep at night and some older people complain of difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep. Lack of exercise may also take a toll on elder sleep and medications may make a person feel drowsy and wanting to sleep during the day. These problems should be discussed with a physician.

As you can see, sleep needs vary across ages and are especially impacted by lifestyle and health. Thus, to determine how much sleep you need, it’s important to assess not only where you fall on the “sleep needs spectrum,” but also to examine what lifestyle factors are affecting the quality and quantity of your sleep such as work schedules and stress. To get the sleep you need, you must look at the big picture.

Though research cannot pinpoint an exact amount of sleep need by people at different ages, the preceding table identifies the “rule-of-thumb” amounts most experts have agreed upon. Nevertheless, it’s important to pay attention to your own individual needs by assessing how you feel on different amounts of sleep. Are you productive, healthy and happy on seven hours of sleep? Or does it take you nine hours of quality ZZZs to get you into high gear? Do you have health issues such as being overweight? Are you at risk for any disease? Are you experiencing sleep problems? Do you depend on caffeine to get you through the day? Do you feel sleepy when driving? These are questions that must be asked before you can find the number that works for you.

What You Can Do

To begin a new path towards healthier sleep and a healthier lifestyle, begin by assessing your own individual needs and habits. See how you respond to different amounts of sleep. Pay careful attention to your mood, energy and health after a poor night’s sleep versus a good one. Ask yourself, “How often do I get a good night’s sleep?” If the answer is “not often”, then you may need to consider changing your sleep habits or consulting a physician or sleep specialist. When Ellen’s family members began this process, they realized that often they weren’t getting what they would call a “good night’s sleep.” This led each of them to reevaluate how much sleep they needed and whether their sleep habits were healthy ones.

To pave the way for better sleep, experts recommend that you and your family members follow these sleep tips:

If you or a family member are experiencing symptoms such as sleepiness during the day or when you expect to be awake and alert, snoring, leg cramps or tingling, gasping or difficulty breathing during sleep, prolonged insomnia or another symptom that is preventing you from sleeping well, you should consult your primary care physician or sleep specialist to determine the underlying cause. You may also try keeping a sleep diary to track your sleep habits over a one- or two-week period and bring the results to your physician.

Most importantly, make sleep a priority. You must schedule sleep like any other daily activity, so put it on your “to-do list” and cross it off every night. But don’t make it the thing you do only after everything else is done – stop doing other things so you get the sleep you need.

Take a tip from Ellen Carol. She said that “After our family made a commitment to getting the sleep we need, it seemed that my husband and I were both more productive with the time we had and the kids seemed a little less grumpy and excitable. Overall, making sleep a priority is something we are going to continue to do.”

Source: http://www.sleepfoundation.org

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A nap as short as 6 minutes after learning can help to consolidate learning and improve performance.

It’s been more than a century since the first scientific evidence was produced that sleep benefits memory.

But the man who stumbled on it, German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, couldn’t believe that learning during sleep could explain anomalies in his results, and he rejected the possibility.

It wasn’t until forty years later that the power of ‘the sleep effect’ was demonstrated directly (Jenkins & Dallenbach, 1924).

Since then, studies have been carried out to find out what types of memory are affected by sleep, how much sleep is required and how the effect occurs.

For example, people have asked: is it just memory for facts, or does it also work for physical movements?

The interest in the effect is hardly surprising: the idea that you can learn while unconscious is one more beautiful thing about sleep.

Learn while you sleep

Here’s a recent example of a typical study investigating the effect.

Payne et al (2012) had people learn a series of word-pairs, like RIDER and SWITCH, either at 9am in the morning or 9pm at night.

There were then tested at 30 minutes after learning, 12 hours later and 24 hours later.

The results showed that whether they learned in the morning or evening, it made little difference to their recall just 30 minutes later.

But, over a longer delay, differences did emerge.

The people who had learned the word-pairs before bed performed better than those that had learned them in the morning.

These are not isolated results. Fenn and Hambrick (2012) carried out a similar study and got the same result: people who learned before they slept did better than those who followed the learning with a period of wakefulness.

These researchers also found that some people, those with a better ‘working memory’, were particularly good at learning while they slept.

Six-minute benefit

There is now all sorts of research showing that different types of learning are improved by a subsequent period of sleep.

For example, procedural learning–like that involved in playing tennis or learning fingering on the piano–is improved by subsequent periods of sleep.

Similarly, perceptual learning–like being able to distinguish two notes from each other–has also shown improvements from subsequent periods of sleep.

Researchers then wondered how short the sleep can be to see the benefits.

It turns out that you’re better off to learn new information before your full eight hours. But benefits to learning have been shown in one study for a nap as short as six minutes (Lahl, 2008).

Learning offline

Scientists aren’t exactly sure why learning benefits from sleep. The old theory used to be that everyday events interfered with newly learned memories causing them to fade away or get muddled. In other words, sleep was better after learning because no new memories could interfere.

Now, though, many psychologists believe that there is an active process at work while we sleep.

During the unconscious period, our minds may be working on the memories and more strongly encoding them for later retrieval.

This may be part of the reason why, like many others, John Steinbeck pointed out:

“It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.”

Source: http://www.spring.org.uk/2013/09/offline-learning-how-the-mind-learns-during-sleep.php

Sleep is for losers. Kush Thaker, 17, doesn’t say so explicitly – he’s a student politician, after at all – but it’s clear that he has been sold on the awake-is-great ethos of modern society. Pulling an all-nighter is “glorified.” The notion that he may spend one-third of his life sleeping is “daunting.” He admires the entrepreneurs whose “brilliant ideas strike at 4 a.m.” High achievers, he explains, “are expected to forgo sleep.”

And Kush has better things to do, including Grade 12 homework, texting, updating his Facebook page, working on a national youth blog and his obligations as a Toronto school board student trustee. He estimates that he gets four to six hours a night. “I know it’s not good, but I have gotten used to functioning while drowsy,” he says. “I wish I did get more sleep. But it’s just rationally weighing the costs and benefits. Sleep is my reserve time.”

But a growing body of brain science and behavioural research serves as a wake-up call to the fact that his calculation is wrong.

For one thing, sleep is an investment that reduces stress and improves productivity. Last year, Harvard researchers estimated that chronic sleep deprivation was costing U.S. companies $63.2-billion annually, because dozy employees are less effective.

Research shows that good sleepers are less likely to smoke, more likely to exercise, and drink less alcohol. Athletes who sleep longer perform better.

Getting extra sleep, a recent study found, really does produce better test results than using the time to crack the books. Sleep even keeps us svelte – when tired, we’re much more likely to be seduced by salty French fries.

It is no coincidence that, over the past 50 years, citizens of the industrialized world have, as well as getting fatter and more anxious, lost about an hour of sleep a night – roughly one full night’s worth every week. And because of city lights, social media and such habits as eating and exercising later at night, what sleep remains is often not the soundest. As Till Roenneberg, the author of Internal Time, points out, 80 per cent of the world now needs an alarm clock to get up each morning. As a result, the head of human chronobiology at the University of Munich’s Institute of Medical Psychology says, we live in a permanent state of “social jet lag.”

And no segment of the population is more jet-lagged than teenagers. Surveys show that no fewer than three-quarters of them fail to get the rest they need, and find themselves in school the next morning expected to learn when their brains want them to sleep.

Society is increasingly torn when it comes to sleep – we lament its loss even as we boast of how little we require. Because rising at dawn made more sense when most people were farmers and candle wax was expensive, the shift from early bird to nighthawk seems of no great consequence.

Yet as science demonstrates how, without enough sleep, the brain falters, there is a growing campaign to turn back the clock. Researchers are calling for more specific school-based interventions, particularly for elementary students, to establish better sleep habits early on life, and to make sleep education more central in health classes.

And what exactly will happen if nothing is done to help people get a decent night’s sleep – can we adapt and learn to thrive with less rest? Scientists admit that they don’t know, but the early indications suggest that society’s new bedtime story won’t have a happy ending.

“We have all heard of healthy eating – the same thing has to happen now with sleep,” says Reut Gruber, a clinical psychologist at McGill University who studies sleep and has created an education program for elementary students in Montreal-area schools.

Adults’ bad habits, she says, are setting an unhealthy pattern because kids get the message that sleep is “a waste of time.” But good diet and exercise won’t make us healthy, if we don’t sleep well at the end of every day.

Dr. Gruber is leading a national committee of psychologists, pediatricians and scientists that is developing new guidelines for healthy sleep for children and youth and strategies to prevent sleep deprivation. When it comes to public health policy, prominent researchers argue that sleep deserves a higher profile – right up with making sure a child gets 60 minutes of exercise a day.

In fact, stressing exercise without giving sleep equal weight may have done some harm, suggests Mark Tremblay, director of the Healthy Active Living and Obesity Research Group at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario in Ottawa.

Dr. Tremblay led the committee that revised the Canadian Physical Activity Guidelines last year, and says that “sleep has been largely lost in this discussion” even though it is vital to a healthy lifestyle.

He worries that parents feel that it’s enough to take their kids to hockey practice on Saturday morning. “As a parent of four kids, I don’t know if I can recall … when I have ever talked casually to neighbours about sleep as an important thing in our children’s lives …,” he says.

“We need to draw sleep into the popular vernacular.”

In Grade 9, to stay awake in class, Ottawa student Andrew Zeigler chugged Monster energy drinks regularly. “I knew it would give me a jump start,” he says, “almost like a car that’s broken down.” Then he began to worry about what was in what he was drinking, and switched to slushies for his midday jolt.

Now, in Grade 11, he’s trying to eat a good breakfast, but with just five hours of sleep most nights, he still feels that he is running on empty. Even so, he has trouble falling asleep: “My mind is on a lot of things.”

Teenagers may be dozy by nature, and concern about children not getting enough sleep goes back more than a century, but research shows that young people really are sleeping less than their parents did at the same age. If anything, culture has shifted away from helping teenagers sleep, with the distractions of 2 a.m. texts, and pressure of extracurricular activities and school performance.

It’s a common teenage tale: In a survey released this week by the Toronto District School Board, 29 per cent of high-school students said they “lose sleep because of worries” and 48 per cent said they feel “tired for no reason,” often if not all the time.

None of the 10 high-school students who commented for this article gets more than seven hours a night, and half admitted to having nodded off in a morning class. They all want more sleep, but none quite knows how to get it.

An obvious solution is to delay the start of the school day. One U.S. study found that pushing school starts times by just one hour improved academic performance and attendance. Many high schools still start at 8 a.m. or shortly afterward – which Dr. Roenneberg, the German sleep researcher, considers evidence of “the enormous discrimination against these young children who are brought to school in the middle of their internal sleep.”

He cites studies that show the academic disadvantages vanish in university, when students can choose later classes.

How much sleep people need and whether they would rather rise early or late are decided by genes, age and how much light they get. There is even a physiological explanation for why teens are notorious for sleeping late. During puberty, melatonin, the hormone that regulates the sleep cycle, is released in the body later in the evening – around 9 or 10 p.m. This makes it difficult for teenagers to nod off early, and nearly impossible, given family and school schedules, for them to get the optimal nine to 10 hours that health guidelines suggest they need.

What’s more, Dr. Roenneberg suggests, our body clocks are out of sync with modern life. “They evolved thinking we would be outside in broad daylight during the day and inside in pitch darkness during the night. We are not living that way any more.” As a result, we get by on less sleep than we need, and spend every night trying to catch up.

Brain experiments and behavioural studies show that this is an unhealthy habit, for memory, cognition and mood at every age. Sleep, in such short supply for today’s adolescents, may be especially important for development during puberty.

And the quality of sleep is a key factor: A Harvard University study released in September found the hormone that triggers ovulation in girls and testosterone production in boys was most actively released by the brain during deep sleep. In a recent experiment at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont., sleep-deprived students were found to have suppressed levels of testosterone, and, compared with a control group, were less motivated to challenge a cheater in a card game.

“You are effectively blunted to do anything inspirational or active, you don’t really care about anything,” says psychology professor Kimberly Cote, who led the study. In another experiment, Brock researchers found that sleepy subjects took significantly longer to notice errors in a computer test than a well-rested control group.

Neuroimaging experiments are also unravelling the stages of sleep – to unlock the role it plays in consolidating memory and controlling behaviour.

At the University of Montreal, researcher Stuart Fogel is conducting studies in which subjects sleep in a magnetic-resonance imaging (MRI) machine after learning a new memory task to see what parts of the brain are active as they rest. (In another experiment, he found that young adults who napped after learning a task performed it better after waking than those who stayed awake.)

Research elsewhere is exploring how sleep is different for people with mental disorders such as schizophrenia. Several papers published last year used MRI scans to show that, when people were short on sleep, the higher-thinking region of the brain that dictates food choices was impaired, leading them to crave sweeter and saltier tastes. Research is also revealing the potential long-term implications of poor sleep – another recent study found a link between sleep and insulin resistance in teenagers, which could affect the risk of diabetes later in life.

And yet a little more sleep goes a long way. In one of Reut Gruber’s recent studies, giving just 27 minutes more sleep to children who are 7 to 11 shows improvements in their emotional behaviour in school, and a significant drop in reported sleepiness. (Dr. Gruber reports similar findings with children with attention-deficit disorders.)

As for Kush Thaker, he has accepted his sleepy adolescence – dozing off in morning classes, catnapping (along with many of his peers) during study period and resorting to the occasional Red Bull, although lately, he is more likely to try water – “drinking, splashing, whatever works.”

Mathew Pilon, 17, a Grade 12 student in Port Colborne, Ont., quips that, unless “the Earth’s rotation slows drastically somehow, … I’m stuck with drowsy morning and sleepless nights.”

The problem is that those drowsy mornings and sleepless nights add up to a lifetime of sleep deficits.

And even if science is still struggling to assess whether the end result will be good or bad, “the impact of poor sleep on society is rather under-appreciated,” a tactful Stuart Fogel says.

by Erin Anderssen

Source: The Globe and Mail

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In the 1960s, the legendary psychologist Albert Bandura rejected the view that learning is passive. Instead he emphasized the importance of the active use of learning strategies. Today, Bandura’s legacy lives on, and has been extended in exciting new directions.

Grounded in Bandura’s pioneering research, in 1986 Barry Zimmerman and Martinez Pons published a paper that helped spur an entire new field of study on self-regulated learning strategies. Zimmerman and Pons interviewed 40 tenth-grade students who were on a “high achievement track” and compared their responses against those of 40 tenth-graders who were in “lower achievement tracks.” Specifically, they asked the students about the learning strategies they used to participate in class, study, and complete their assignments. Through the course of their interviews, they identified fourteen self-regulated learning strategies. They found that the high-achieving students differed from the low-achieving students in regard to whether they used these strategies, how much they used the strategies, and their consistency in using the strategies.

Over the past few decades there have been multiple studies showing the effectiveness of the self-regulated learning strategies approach using a variety of methodologies (e.g., think-aloud protocols, diaries, observation). In one recent large review, John Dunlosky and colleagues evaluated the relative utility of ten learning strategies. While some of the learning strategies (e.g., highlighting, rereading) were found to have low utility in benefitting learning outcomes, the following strategies were assessed as having moderate to high utility: practice testing (high), distributed practice (high), elaborative interrogation (medium), self-explanation (medium), and interleaved practice (medium). Practice testing had the most evidence supporting its benefits for learning across context and over time.

Researchers have also recently begun to integrate the learning strategies approach with the expert performance approach. A plethora of research shows that a very deliberate type of practice involving the active use of strategies to maximize performance and overcome limitations is essential to greatness across many domains, including the arts, sciences, and sports. Excitedly, recent research suggests that the expert performance approach can also be applied to increase our understanding of the acquisition of school-based knowledge.

In one study, Kiruthiga Nandagopal and K. Anders Ericsson investigated the use of self-regulated learning strategies among advanced undergraduate bioscience majors. Because these students “made active decisions to embark on the road to acquiring expertise in the biological sciences,” they met the expert performance approach criteria. Adopting one of the key methodologies of the expert performance approach, they analyzed student diaries over the course of three weeks, estimating the presence, frequency, and duration (in terms of total number of hours) of self-regulated learning strategies. They grouped fourteen self-regulated learning strategies into six main categories: self-regulating (self-assessing, goal-setting, planning, and so on), organizing, seeking information, mnemonic usage, seeking social assistance (for instance, seeking assistance from peers, tutors, and professors), and reviewing (reviewing prior problems, notes, textbook, and such). Then they compared the diary responses among the following three groups of achievers based on their GPA before entering the course: high-achieving students (GPA > 3.7), average-achieving students (GPA ≥ 3) and low-achieving students (GPA < 3).

Comparing the diary responses of the different groups of achievers, they found that the high-achieving students reported employing a larger number of different strategies. The high-achieving students were particularly more likely to engage in organizing and transforming, seeking information, and reviewing strategies compared to the low-achieving students. Timing was also critical. While students engaged in organizing, transforming, and reviewing notes more frequently and for longer stretches of time during the midterm week than other weeks, high-achieving students sought more assistance from their peers and spent more time studying during midterm weeks compared to low-achieving students. In contrast, low-achieving students engaged in these strategies more than average-achieving students toward the end of the semester. High-achieving students also spent more time overall in study-related activities earlier in the semester compared to average and low-achieving students, whereas there was no such difference between the groups later on in the semester.

The most important learning strategies for predicting end-of-semester GPA were (1) seeking information, (2) reviewing the textbook, and (3) seeking assistance from peers during the midterm week. While the correlation between prior SAT scores and semester GPA was significant, once the most predictive learning strategies were considered, prior SAT scores didn’t explain any additional variation in end of semester GPA. Considering  IQ scores (which are highly correlated with SAT scores) are known to be excellent predictors of academic achievement, this finding is actually quite striking! While these findings certainly don’t invalidate the predictive value of IQ tests, they do suggest that one of the crucial reasons why those with higher general cognitive ability tend to do so well across so many learning situations is due, in large part, to their use of efficient learning strategies that maximize learning outcomes.

This idea is consistent with a fascinating study conducted by Nandagopal, Roy Roring, and Jeanette Taylor. They had twins think aloud while they were taking three cognitive tests that are significantly correlated with IQ–  associative learning, working memory, and processing speed. After analyzing the thought processes of the participants, the researchers found that performance on all three cognitive tests was heavily influenced by cognitive strategies (e.g., mnemonic encoding techniques). Most compellingly, differences in strategy use on the associative learning task (which was most amenable to the use of strategies) explained a significant amount of the genetic influences on performance. While there certainly needs to be more research on the development of learning strategies, this study is the first to demonstrate that the heritability of performance on cognitive tasks is due, in part, to the use of specific cognitive strategies.

Another recent study further supports the importance of learning strategies for predicting long-term growth and achievement. Kou Murayama and colleagues investigated the simultaneous prediction of motivation, learning strategies and IQ for explaining the long-term growth in mathematics achievement from Grades 5 to 10 among a sample of German students. Their measure of math achievement tested competencies such as arithmetic, algebra, and geometry. At the start of their study, IQ, motivation, and learning strategies significantly predicted math performance, with motivation and learning strategies adding additional prediction above IQ.

A different story emerged, however, once they looked at the predictors of long-term growth. IQ was not related to growth in mathematics achievement after taking into account demographic information. In contrast, perceived control (e.g., “When doing math, the harder I try, the better I perform”), intrinsic motivation (e.g., “I invest a lot of effort in math, because I am interested in the subject”), and deep learning strategies (e.g., “When I study for exams, I try to make connections with other areas of math”), significantly predicted growth of mathematics knowledge. What’s more, surface learning strategies (“For some math problems I memorize the steps to the correct solution”) negatively predicted mathematics growth.

The researchers related their findings to The Matthew Effect: those with high intrinsic motivation and effective learning strategies will tend to increase their ability, while those without those characteristics will tend to decrease their ability. Over time, the gap between those with higher ability and those with lower ability will widen. Which is all the more reason why we ought to set up the right conditions for active engagement for everyone, and teach people the proper strategies for success.

If you’d like to learn more about different kinds of minds and the many paths to greatness, you may be interested in my forthcoming book “Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined, coming out this summer from Basic Books.

By: By Scott Barry Kaufman

Source: scientificamerican.com