Do morning people do better in school because school starts early?

Enlarge / Zzz... (credit: Sarah / Flickr)

The terms "night owl" and "early bird" have floated around in conversation for ages before scientists developed the jargon "chronotype" to describe a set of somewhat stable behavioral differences among people. Some individuals really are morning people, going to bed earlier and having their peak performance in the morning. Late-night sorts also exist, and there's a spectrum of people somewhere in between. Leading a lifestyle that doesn't match your chronotype leads to what's called a social jet lag, which has been linked to everything from school performance to frequency of car crashes.

But the "somewhat" portion of the "somewhat stable" description of chronotype is very real. People's chronotypes change as they age, and there's some indication that it can adapt to everything from light exposures to lifestyle.

All of that seemingly comes together at a rather important point in people's lives. School tends to start early, which studies have indicated works out well for the grades of morning people. And exacerbating this is the fact that adolescents normally see their chronotype shift ever later, typically reaching a lifetime peak in the late teens. Now, a group of Argentinian scientists has tracked what happens to students performance when there's different mismatches between chronotype and school start times.

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