Does Studying in Bed Hurt Grades?

Does Studying in Bed Hurt Grades?

Forty years ago, Robert Gifford spent a few weeks banging on university dorm doors and asking whether they were studying. Gifford didn’t want to party; he just wanted to see whether the students were working at their desks or on their beds, then compare their grade-point averages.

Gifford’s little experiment was a rare serious effort to answer a question that erupts* in millions of households and dorms across the nations: Will I do better if I study in an uncomfortable position? The answer’s certainly yes, if you go by published study guides and the venerable* experts who write them.
Cultural historian Edward Tenner suspects that the uncomfortable chair theory is rooted in the (one phrase) that flourished* between World Wars I and Ⅱ. It asserted a connection between sitting straight and straight thinking.

A change in thinking

But Gifford and Robert Sommer, who are well-known environmental psychologists, found that of the above-average scholars surveyed, half studied at their desks and half studied on their beds. Among the below-average students, 47 percent studied in bed and 53 percent studied at their desks. Of the 86 students with GPAs of 3.0 or better, 53 percent worked at their desks; the rest, on their beds. Among the 18 students with GPAs of 2.0 or under, two-thirds worked at their desks. “Desks are really confining*, and are worse than desks,” Sommer said. They suggest that students work wherever it comes naturally.

Even some traditionalists are growing more flexible. Charles Camp, who teaches civil engineering at the University of Memphis, offers advice on the school website: “Sit upright; if you’re too relaxed your mind will be too slow.”

“But [these ideas] don’t seem to apply to the newer generation of students,” Camp adds. “Studying just seems to happen wherever they’re comfortable.”

post by Advance studio classroom magazine