In this registered report, we propose an evaluation of how sleep is related to school functioning. Vulnerable populations including children with disabilities, children of color, and children experiencing socioeconomic disadvantage are more likely to both experience learning difficulties (e.g., in achievement, classroom behavior, and executive function) and to experience suboptimal sleep health. Understanding which aspects of sleep have the strongest relations with school functioning is important to better direct resources to policies and programs that promote healthy sleep during childhood. Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, we propose a series of structural equation models evaluating whether sleep at age 5 has a direct or indirect nonlinear effect on academic achievement, executive function, and classroom behavior at age 9, and whether this relation is moderated by race or ethnicity, poverty, maternal education, or disability. Our project will provide insight into whether interventions for suboptimal sleep health are especially likely to benefit vulnerable populations including children with disabilities, those who are non-white, and those from economically disadvantaged homes.
In this registered report, we evaluated how sleep is related to school functioning. Using data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 3002), we evaluated a series of structural equation models evaluating whether sleep at age 5 has a direct or indirect effect on academic achievement, executive function and classroom behaviour at age 9, and whether this relation is moderated by race or ethnicity, poverty, maternal education or disability. We found that sleep duration (but not other aspects of sleep health) had a direct, linear relation to attention problems, acting-out behaviours and executive functions, as well as an indirect effect on academic achievement through executive functions. We also found that this model was moderated by disability, poverty, maternal education and race or ethnicity. Our results suggest that experiencing insufficient amounts of sleep may have a disproportionately negative effect on children with disabilities or children whose mothers received less education. Initiatives to promote healthy sleep habits, including increasing sleep duration among these groups, may thus also indirectly raise measures of achievement.