Digital Textbooks & Sleep

The pandemic accelerated a trend that started to negatively affect our children in the early 2000s: substituting textbooks with e-books and paper notebooks with online assignments. Marketed as a sustainable practice that aligns with STEM, online materials are a cost-cutting strategy with unproven educational value. High School, Middle School and even Elementary students are completing many assignments on devices that emit blue light — a documented sleep disrupter.

On a recent episode of NPR's Life Kit, Allison Aubrey interviewed Matthew P. Walker, a sleep specialist at Berkeley’s Center for Human Sleep Science. Like caffeine and alcohol, blue light from tablets, laptops, and phones seriously disrupts sleep. In studies comparing one hour of paper book reading with iPad reading, “the iPad … blocked the release of melatonin by 50%.” Melatonin, the chemical that makes you feel sleepy, is critical to getting a full night’s sleep. Even worse, the spike of melatonin is delayed by three hours. The facts are clear: using a device in the evening confuses your brain and delays sleep.

So, why are we giving students digital copies of textbooks and asking them to complete assignments online? Sleep is a critical part of learning. At night, our brains sort through the day’s events, committing new information to memory. Lack of sleep is detrimental to our health, bad for learning, and sets terrible habits. Students need paper textbooks and handwritten learning methods for many reasons — and better sleep is one of them.

School administrators should look carefully at sleep research. Of course, our children need to be technologically literate, but not at the cost of health. Let’s bring back textbooks and handwritten notes. I’ll bet we’ll see some sleepy tweens and teens.