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School-based programs to improve students' sleep have been ongoing for 15 years.

Modest gains have been attained in the majority of studies.

To achieve better results, programs should have multiple components and extend over a long period.

School-based programs to improve sleep seem to hold promise for reaching large numbers of adolescents, and numerous studies have been reported. As the implications for health problems related to insufficient sleep became apparent beginning in the mid-1990s, survey data showed that the percentage of adolescents getting enough sleep went down. In a 2024 paper, 21 school intervention studies between 2011 and 2022 were reviewed (Gaskin et al. 2024).

Before going into what the review found, let’s look at a typical study. Australian researchers conducted an intervention with a rigorous randomized control group design (Rigney et al. 2015). Using 12 schools, they enlisted 296 students with a mean age of 12.2 years with half assigned to the experimental treatment group and half to a no-treatment control group. The treatment was four weekly classroom........

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