The Impact of Later Secondary School Start Times on Adolescent Academic Achievement and Attendance

Download or read book The Impact of Later Secondary School Start Times on Adolescent Academic Achievement and Attendance written by Gregg R. Shulenberger and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends 8.5 to 9.5 hours of sleep per night for adolescents (Barnes et al., 2016). Additionally, sleep behavior and scientific research about teenagers and young adults, from the late 1990s, showed developmental changes in melatonin release around this age that impacts starting sleep times (Wahlstrom, 2014). Despite the availability of this and other research on adolescent sleep and school start times, over 80% of the secondary school start times across the United States were before the 8:30 a.m. recommended time (National Center for Educational Research, 2017). The purpose of this quantitative study was to build upon the initial research available from the 2019 Pennsylvania Joint State Government Commission report on Secondary School Start Times. The researcher collected gender, grade level, ethnicity, socioeconomic status and special education services data from two suburban school districts in Pennsylvania that had changed their secondary school start times to at least 30 minutes later in the past five years with the hope of identifying the impact of the time change on the academic achievement and attendance data of students in these districts.