In addition to that, one should admit that sleep deprivation impacts high school students in particular ways. A scientific article comments on the connection between insufficient sleep time and reduced attention span (Kansagra S205). This finding reveals that it becomes more difficult for adolescents to stay focused on a single task or activity. Since their concentration is lower, they are more likely to make mistakes while completing some assignments. It is also possible to suggest that people’s memory suffers since reduced attention makes memorizing troublesome. That is why Kansagra concludes that high school students’ cognitive performance is impaired, which negatively influences their academic achievement (S205). This information evidently describes a connection between sleep deprivation and learning outcomes because it is challenging to succeed when memory and attention performance is compromised.

While the findings above have commented on objective consequences, it is also necessary to consider subjective ones. As a rule, high school students do not feel or understand that their cognitive abilities are impaired. These people do not link poor academic results with staying awake till night. However, adolescents can notice the impact of the selected behavior on their subjective well-being. One should admit that sleep deprivation leads to feeling sleepy and tired (Toyong 54). These conditions often result in the fact that high school students do not have sufficient motivation to engage in the learning process actively. Simultaneously, these individuals can rely on their physical and emotional tiredness to justify their non-involvement in completing homework assignments. Under such conditions, there is no doubt that teenagers do not have sufficient energy and motivation to focus on achieving positive outcomes in the learning sphere.

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As has already been mentioned, high school students have a few reasons for staying awake till late at night. There can be some objective factors that lead to individual sleep deprivation cases, but surfing the Internet and playing computer or mobile games are more typical and systematic. This scenario is prevalent during weekdays, meaning that adolescents go to bed late and experience difficulties waking up in the morning. Some of these people believe that sleeping more hours during weekends is a way to compensate for this problem. This approach is also known as a sleep bank strategy, implying that people require extra hours of sleep to prepare for a sleep deprivation period. It is now necessary to consider whether this way can minimize the negative impacts of inefficient sleep on academic achievement.

Many experts admit the issue that there exists weekday-to-weekend sleep discrepancy among teenagers. The study by Sun et al. is among them, and the scholars admit that this approach is not productive (27). The rationale behind this statement is that extra hours of sleep during weekends cannot cover sleep deficiency that is earned during weekdays. Sun et al. have found that those high school students that followed this approach had more mediocre academic performance and suffered from depressive symptoms (27). The rationale behind these findings can refer to the fact that negative effects of the lack of sleep are accumulated during weekdays, and weekends offer insufficient time to recover from them. That is why it is evident that various manifestations of sleep deprivation adversely affect high school students’ academic achievement.

Potential Response

Since numerous experts present sufficient evidence to claim that sleep deprivation adversely affects high school students’ learning performance, it is reasonable to comment on how the issue can be addressed. An evident answer implies that children should go to bed earlier. However, parents’ active involvement is required to implement this intervention, but not all adults will contribute because not all of them understand the importance of this issue. That is why it is necessary to implement an improvement at the system level. The article by Dunster et al. meets this requirement and comments on the effects of a delayed school start time (1). These scholars identified that a decision to start school class one hour later led to increased sleep duration and almost 5% better grades among high school students (Dunster et al. 1). Consequently, this decision can be an effective intervention to minimize the adverse consequences of sleep deprivation among adolescents.

Conclusion

The essay has gathered and discussed many negative effects of sleep deprivation on high school students’ academi