A Study on the Sleeping Habits of Senior High School Students at the Infant Jesus Montessori

School

ROB KIAN S. SABIO

 CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION

Every normally functioning human being requires adequate number of hours of sleep to
perform effectively and efficiently in their everyday life. People spend one third of their entire
lives sleeping. Sleep is an essential part of human life without which the mind and body cannot
function normally and optimally. When people are sleep deprived, they feel tired, easily irritated,
hungry and not well. On the other hand, adequate amount of sleep, yet again, makes us feel
energetic and ready for daily challenges. During sleep the body heals itself, consolidates learning
and memories and restores its chemical balance (Pietrangelo & Watson, 2017).

At one or more points in life, each person has probably experienced a bad night of sleep.
This could range from not getting enough hours of sleep to waking up in the middle of the night
several times or up to not getting any sleep at all. Whichever the case might be, the observable
effects of sleep deprivation were always the same. People will always feel tiresome, unfocused,
and pale the next day. Sleep deprivation can be intentional, it can be a result from a hectic work-
or social life or even be a sign of a sleep disorder or other medical problem (Davis 2016).
Senior high school is probably one of the most stressful stages in a person’s life. At this
phase, students are in the crossroads of enjoying the remaining days of high school while planning
and preparing for their college education. It is at this stage in life when students work hard to
balance having a flourishing social life while maintaining decent academic records. Hence, most
students resort to multi-tasking where they try to mingle with their friends on social media while
staying at home to finish the towering requirements that come with their senior high school
education. As a result, students tend to get lesser and lesser hours of sleep which could significantly
affect their academic performance.
In the Philippines, most of the classes start between seven o’clock to seven thirty in the
morning. While this has been normally the class schedule and people deem it as effective, most
students prefer to get up at noon. Professor Russell Foster, Head of Circadian neuroscience in
Oxford University said, “forcing teenagers to turn up to school in the morning could result in more
errors, fewer memory, reduced motivation and depression.”
As a move, Bacolod representative, Cong. Greg Gasataya, proposed House Bill 569 or the
Adjusted Class Hours Act of 2019 which aims to regulate class hours under the Department of
Education (DepEd) and the Commission on Higher Education (CHED). Cong Gasataya wants to
prohibit public and private institutions from starting classes earlier than 8:30 a.m. The proposal of
this bill recognizes that the K-12 curriculum puts more workload on students and the need to
improve students’ academic performance by promoting students’ welfare (Luci-Atienza, 2019).
It may take some time before this bill will be passed or denied. However, it is imperative
to assess the prevailing factors, aside from the aforementioned, which keep the senior high school
students up during later hours of the night.
 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
This research entitled A Study on the Sleeping Habits of Senior High School Students at
the Infant Jesus Montessori School A.Y. 2019-2020 aims to document and create a profile of the
sleeping quality and habits of selected senior high school students from the Infant Jesus Montessori
School in order to determine whether or not senior high school student population is sleep
deprived. These can be achieved by answering the following questions:
 What are the common sleeping habits of IJMS senior high school students?
 What factors pose risk of sleep deprivation among IJMS senior high school students?

OBJECTIVES
Generally, this study aims to create a profile of the sleeping quality and habits of Infant
Jesus Montessori School senior high school students for A.Y. 2019-2020. Specifically, this study
aims to:
1. determine the average number of hours the IJMS senior high school students sleep at night;
2. determine the prevailing habits causing sleep deprivation among IJMS senior high school
students;
3. assess the over-all sleeping quality and habits of IJMS senior high school students;
4. determine whether or not sleep deprivation affects academic performance.

SCOPE AND DELIMITATIONS

This study is limited to the senior high school students of Infant Jesus Montessori School
for the current school year, A.Y. 2019-2020; thus, it covers all the senior high school students
regardless of their academic track.
This study will determine whether or not the senior high school students are sleep deprived
or not, based on the resulting average number of hours sleep that they get on weekdays. The study
will not conduct a sleep test to measure the number of hours that the students get each night.
The study will be limited to the recognition of whether or not sleep deprivation affects the
students’ academic performance. As a limit, the study will not determine the specific areas of
academic performance that are affected by sleep deprivation.

SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

This study will serve as an eye-opener and personal assessment for the senior high school
students regarding their sleeping habits. The results of this study can also be utilized by the IJMS
teachers in morning classes in order for them to create classroom activities which can make early
classes more enjoyable and active for the students. Lastly, this study can serve as baseline research
to further researches regarding the sleeping quality and habits of IJMS senior high school students.
 HYPOTHESIS
It is hypothesized that IJMS senior high school students are sleep deprived and that sleep
deprivation negatively affects their academic performance.

DEFINITION OF TERMS
The following terms had been operationally defined for the better understanding of this study:
 IJMS Senior High School students—grade 11 and grade 12 students at the Infant Jesus
Montessori School for the current academic year, A.Y. 2019-2020

 Sleep deprivation—condition of having less than the 8 hours of prescribed sleep

 Academic performance—student performance in class

 Sleep quality—over-all length of sleep in hours, time difference between going to bed and
falling asleep, number of times of waking up after falling asleep

 Sleeping habits—person’s activities before going to sleep, conditions wherein a person

falls asleep, and person’s everyday habits which can affect sleep quality.
 CHAPTER II
REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
Sleep
Sleep is a part of normal daily life. It is a necessity that we cannot survive without. It is
said that one can survive only so long without sleep before dying. That only proves how important
sleep is. When we go to sleep our bodies don’t shut down or go on a pause mode. They stay active
and recover physically and mentally. During sleep the body’s energy resources fill up, the wounds
and illnesses heal and the body protects itself against illnesses. Our brains are very active when
we are asleep. Even though we are not conscious our brain goes through everything that has
happened during the day; it restores memories and deletes memories. It supports our learning and
gets rid of unnecessary thoughts. The brain never pauses, it’s always working (Pihl & Aronen,
2015 cited by Henna, 2018).
The amount of sleep a person needs can vary a lot. Many factors affect the amount of
sleep a person needs. These factors include, for example, age, gender, overall health condition
and a personal life. The age is a big factor in an individual need of sleep. Newborns and children
less than 12 months old sleep a lot, in average 15-18 hours a day, when again seniors (age over
65) sleep only 6-7 hours a day. A person’s individual development has a big effect on the amount
of sleep the person needs. During one’s development (e.g. childhood and puberty) the body
requires more sleep to be able to physically develop. (Rintahaka, 2016 as cited by Henna, 2018.)

American National Sleep Foundation (NSF) has published updated sleep recommendations
in 2015. These recommendations based on a vast systematic sleep literature review give guidance
what’s the recommended amount of sleep for a person based on his age. The following table (see
figure 1) presents the new, updated sleep duration recommendations (National Sleep Foundation
2015).

Figure 1. The sleep duration recommendations (National Sleep Foundation, 2015)

Sleep Deprivation
Sleep deprivation, or lack of sleep, is a very common stage where a person does not get
enough sleep. Nearly everybody experiences sleep deprivation at some point of their life. The more
the world develops, the society and life get more demanding, the less we sleep (Henna, 2018).
Sleep deprivation and sleepiness are caused by a host of reasons and have numerous
negative consequences. In the literature, sleep deprivation is often termed either acute sleep
deprivation or chronic partial sleep deprivation. Colloquially for students, acute sleep deprivation
is termed “pulling an all-nighter”, meaning that a person stays up for 24 hours or longer. More
typically, sleep deprivation consists of chronic partial sleep deprivation, where a student obtains
some, but not adequate sleep. Sleepiness can be an obvious consequence of sleep deprivation, but
sleepiness can be caused by other circumstances, most commonly sleep disorders (Hershner &
Chervin, 2014). The reasons for sleep deprivation include alcohol and caffeine intake, stimulants,
and technology, which prevent students achieving sufficient sleep time and quality (Moss, 2017).
One major phenomenon that has been gradually eroding the health of the Philippines is
lack of sleep. From the effects of unbearable traffic to the explosion of the business process
outsourcing industry to the geometric rise of Internet usage nationwide, millions of Filipinos are
choosing to sleep less and less, with dangerous effects. We seem to think that staying awake to
finish work is the lesser evil. It isn’t. It is a danger we have to address, and soon (Velasco, 2015).
According to the 2016 Healthy Living Index Survey, Filipinos have one of the highest rates
of sleep deprivation in Asia; 46% of Filipinos do not get enough sleep while 32% said they sleep
for less than six hours (Philips, 2017).
Sleep Deprivation and School
Staying up late to cram for an early exam may not be doing students any good, according
to a new study focused on students and their sleep patterns. The study, published in the journal
Scientific Reports, says students who did not go to bed or wake up at consistent times every day
were more likely to have lower grades. For the study, 61 students from Harvard College kept online
diaries of their sleep schedules for 30 days.
Researchers identified two groups: regular sleepers, or those who went to bed and woke up
about the same time every day, and irregular sleepers, who had different sleep patterns every day.
There were several differences between regular and irregular sleepers, including significant
differences in grade point averages. Using a unique scoring index from zero to 100 to calculate a
student's sleep regularity, students with very irregular sleep patterns were given lower scores close
to zero, while more regular sleepers were given higher scores close to 100. The researchers found
that for every score increase of 10 on the regularity index, the student had an average increase of
0.10 in their GPA (Knight, 2017).
In a study, a group of students were given a series of math problems with some tips on how
to solve these. They were told of a shortcut solution to the problems that they should discover
during the process. They were tested 12 hours after the training. Of the students who were not
allowed to sleep before the math test, only 20 percent discovered the shortcut. However, those
students who were allowed eight hours of sleep performed much better. Sixty percent of them
found the shortcut (Leonidas, 2012).
Most studies of adolescent sleep habits show that total sleep time tends to decrease and the
timing of sleep tends to be delayed; this pattern seems to be quite frequent among high school
students and often leads to increased daytime sleepiness and to a significant influence on daytime
functioning and academic achievement (Lazaratou et al, 2005).
Physiologically, adolescents and young adults tend to have a delayed circadian preference,
and are “night owls”.This change occurs in association with puberty; more physically mature
adolescents have a preference for later bedtimes and may have a lower homeostatic sleep drive,
and consequently, are less sleepy at night (Chervin & Hershner, 2014).

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

Questionnaire
Data analysis IJMS Senior High
results on the
through data School sleeping
population's
presentation in habits and sleep
sleeping habits and
charts and graphs quality profile
sleep quality
 CHAPTER III
METHODOLOGY
This chapter presents the method of research used in the study, the techniques or collecting
the data and the development of the research document, and also the procedures needed to be
followed in order to organize the data-gathering.

RESEARCH METHOD
This study researched by using a qualitative research method. Qualitative research is a form
of research which focuses on how humans experience some certain issue or phenomena. It tends
to understand, describe and interpret the behavior, feelings and experiences of a human kind. It
generalizes the specifics and forms theory based on the data. (Holloway & Galvin 2017 as cited
by Henna, 2018)
The data in a qualitative research is collected in natural, real settings. The most common
data collection methods are interview, a questionnaire, observation and knowledge based on
different documents and documentations. These are used either as alternative, side by side or
combined in different ways based on the research questions. (Holloway & Galvin, 2017; Tuomi &
Sarajärvi,2011 as cited by Henna, 2018).

DATA COLLECTION
For this study, data collection will be done through the floating of questionnaires to all the
samples. Each questionnaire will be answered individually by the samples who will represent the
entire IJMS senior high school student population. The questionnaires are made by the student
researcher and will be checked and approved by the research teacher. The student researcher will
also personally administer and collect the questionnaires.

THE RESPONDENTS
The respondents will be selected using the random sampling technique among the students.
The marginal error and the proportion of the study population will be set at 0.05. There are 193
total students in the IJMS Senior High School department.

SAMPLE AND SAMPLING PROCEDURE

The sources of data are the senior high school students of Infant Jesus Montessori School
whose total population is 193 students. A sampling procedure was done to determine how many
respondents should be using the formula:
 N
n=
1 + 𝑁𝑒 2

193
n =
1 + 193 (0.05)2
193
n =
1 + 0.4825

n = 130

Therefore, the total sampling population for this study is 130 randomly selected senior
high school students.
 REFERENCES CITED
INTERNATIONAL

Chervin, R.D., Hershner, S.D. (2014). Causes and consequences of sleepiness among college
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Davis, K.(2016). Sleep Deprivation: Causes, Symptoms and Treatment. Medical News Today.
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Henna, M. (2018). A study about students’ sleeping habits. Accessed August 30, 2019 from the
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Lazaratou, H., et. al. (2005) . Sleep problems in adolescence: A study of senior high school
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LOCAL

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Leonidas, L. (2012). Loss of sleep and learning. Accessed September 1, 2019 from the World
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Luci-Atienza, C. (2019). Bacolod solon wants class hours to start not earlier than 8:30 a.m.
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