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Carbon student wins cash for sleep study
By Joe Bauman
Deseret News staff writer

Losing even two hours of sleep a night will damage a child's thinking ability, a high school researcher has discovered.

Jenifer Anne Jewkes won $1,000 for an experiment that tested effects of sleep deprivation.

The science project by Jenifer Anne Jewkes, a senior at Carbon High School, Price, is not only one of the best entries in the Intel Science Talent Search, a competition that drew 1,592 applicants from 36 states and Washington, D.C. It also is a wake-up call for parents who pay too little attention to their children's sleeping habits.

Jewkes recently won honors as an Intel semifinalist, earning $1,000 for herself and an equal sum for Carbon High School. Those among the 300 semifinalists who are chosen for the 40 finalist spots will compete for college scholarships totaling $530,000.

"The name of my project was 'The Effect of Sleep Restriction on the Cognitive Function of Elementary School Children,' " Jewkes, 17, said in a telephone interview. She carried out the experiment a little more than a year ago.

Illustrating the way the Internet has improved education, Jewkes worked with a mentor, Jodi A. Mindell, an associate professor of psychology at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia, in designing and conducting the experiments. She contacted Mindell by e-mail after reading scientific articles the Pennsylvania woman wrote about sleep disorders.

"We've been e-mailing and faxing and talking to each other back and forth on the phone for the past two years," Jewkes said.

She recruited two groups of fourth-graders from a local school, Castle Heights Elementary in Price. Parents of all participants signed informed-consent agreements.

The experiment started out with 42 students, but she whittled that down to 38 — four kids seemed to have such irregular hours, at least in a pre-testing log that parents kept, that she decided they would confuse the issue.

All of the students were tested before the experiment got under way, checking their reasoning ability and their creativity. She wanted to see if sleep deprivation would affect students' skills, and if so, whether logic or creativity would be affected more deeply.

The "convergent abilities" test looked at math processing, including how fast students could answer math problems; visual memory; and sound memory. The "divergent abilities" test looked for signs of creativity in students' drawings, using criteria established by a Salt Lake City behavioral-research firm.

In the creativity test, "the student was asked to make a picture or draw and make something out of the box" in a matrix of dots. Scoring was based on such criteria as whether a student used a figure hinted in patterns provided rather than inventing a new image.

"My control group maintained a regular sleep schedule throughout the week of experimentation, and my experimental group also maintained a regular sleep schedule except for the night before" a final test was given.

That night, the children stayed up two hours past their regular bedtime. To make sure the experiment wouldn't have a huge impact on the youngsters' performance at school, Jewkes kept them up late on a Friday night, which gave them most of the weekend to recover.

The fourth-graders went that night to the high school "and I had kind of a party," she said. Teachers chaperoned the well-behaved youths. Because this was around Christmas, they watched a video with a holiday theme, and "we had games that we played in the gym."

The next morning, the parents brought in the experimental group for testing. "I think the parents looked more tired when they walked in than the children."

The tests showed that staying up late had what she terms a statistically significant effect on the children's creative thinking. Their logic abilities were not affected.

Jewkes reasons, "The divergent thinking was affected the most . . . because part of our brain called the prefrontal cortex is the first part of the brain that's affected by sleep restriction, and that's where creative thinking takes place."

The loss of sleep made the students less creative, Jewkes found.

"Even though some of them might have been bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (during the Saturday tests), that did affect at least their creative thinking."

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