‘Getting enough sleep key to examination success’

A GOOD night’s sleep may not be high on the agenda for students across but, according to new research, it could be key to successful learning.

Academics from the Department of Psychology at Royal Holloway University, Britain, found that learners were able to remember and consolidate material more effectively having slept on the new information.

The research also suggested that learning material in stages and getting enough sleep in between sessions, meant students were better able to make connections and remember information, putting paid to the belief that ‘cramming’ before an exam is an effective means of revision.

It comes as research published by the Sleep Council, last month, found that more than half of teenagers confessed to regularly cramming all their revision for an examination into one night.

During this study, researchers taught a group of people new words from a fictional language, characterised by a rule relating the new words to one another.

They found that, although learners became aware of the rule within the new language shortly after being taught it, they were unable to apply it to new words until after a period of rest.

Professor of Cognitive Psychology at Royal Holloway, Kathy Rastle, said that while “teachers have long suspected that proper rest was critical for successful learning. Our research provides some experimental support for this notion.”

“Previously, people had started to look at how we learn individual new words, but we have gone beyond this,” she said.

“In our study, we had a hidden rule binding words together, and we looked at what it takes to get at that hidden rule – which is essential for children learning phonics. We learnt that you need a period of consolidation to understand and apply rules.”

Speaking to the Telegraph of London about the study, published today in the journal Cognitive Psychology, Prof. Rastle explained how important sleep was in processing additional information and introducing rule exceptions, such as the difference between the ‘Ch’ in ‘church’, ‘check’ and ‘chest’ compared with ‘chaos’.

“When you introduce exceptions to the rule in initial training, participants never learn the initial rule,” she explained. “If you want to introduce exceptions, you first need to let students consolidate the rule.

“There’s a dual mechanism model in the brain,” she stated adding, “There’s a structure called a hippocampus, which is a rapid learner. It learns individual items or examples rapidly.
“However, while you are resting, while you are consolidating the information, the hippocampus replays the information and it gradually becomes encoded in the neocortex.”

Rastle explained that the research could equally apply to revision before exams.

“When we are revising we are not just trying to remember individual statistics, we are trying to extract concepts,” she said.

“So our research shows that you have to have a consolidation period.

“Secondly, if you are building on information, you need to structure your learning in such a way that it is spaced. Learn a little bit today, sleep on it, learn a little bit tomorrow, sleep on it. Certainly, our research would suggest that cramming and not getting proper rest is probably not going to be a good strategy for acing the examination.”