Adolescent Sleep Deprivation: The Need for Later School Start Times

Summary Sleep deprivation is very common in adolescents and can contribute to many different problems that can be avoided with simple changes in daily sleep routines. According to the article, “young and sleep deprived” by Karen Weintraub many psychologists want to persuade middle schools and high schools to push back start times to increase safety and performance in their students’ everyday lives. They claim that the reason why teenagers are drowsy and experience impaired attention span in class is because of sleep deprivation. Psychologists claim this because students around the United States are waking up before their circadian rhythms or internal clocks tell them to awake. Therefore, if students awake before their circadian

The author of the article is Karen Weintraub and the author is a Cambridge based writer and her stories frequently appear in the New York Times, USA Today and the Boston Globe. The next aspect that I will be critiquing is the purpose of the article. The purpose of this article is to persuade middle schools and high schools to push back their starting times to reduce sleep deprivation. The next aspect that I will be critiquing is the publication of the article. The article was published on the Monitor on Psychology in February, 2016. This article was self-published but however there is a section in the article where critics are giving their input on the subject. The source that was cited in this article is “Later School Start Times Promote Adolescent Well-Being,” which is a fact sheet from APA’s Children, Youth and Families

The first strength of the article is the central concept of the article. The concept of the article is the idea how sleep deprivation is an issue that affects a large amount of people. The next strength is the purpose or what the article sets out to do. This articles purpose is to persuade schools to push back start times to reduce the number of students that are sleep deprived. The next strength of the article is the evidence and research that is provided. There is a lot of evidence in this article that proves that pushing back school start times improves a student’s performance in school. There is also quotes in the article that were stated by psychologists and professionals that supports the claim of the article. The first weakness of the article is that it contains self-reported information. For example, in this article there was a quote by a student’s classmate and he states that she was effortless in class and has attention impairment. The problem with this is that her classmate could have been untrustworthy and not tell telling the truth. The next weakness of this article is the study was conducted poorly. The study in this article was a woman that followed around students and measured how tired they were. This is weak because of there is a possible amount of extraneous variables that could be causing the students drowsiness and therefore would not be caused by sleep