Longitudinal Relations Between Sleep Duration and Academic Achievement in U.S. Elementary School Children

Sleep duration is a modifiable health behavior that is causally related to children’s school functioning. We examined whether sleep and academic achievement were bidirectionally interrelated over a multiyear period in a nationally representative U.S. cohort ( N = 11,240) of elementary schoolchildren. We used random-intercept cross-lagged panel modeling and evaluated for moderation by race or ethnicity, socioeconomic status (SES), and disability. We observed few significant cross-lagged within-person relations between sleep duration and achievement. Family SES but no other sociodemographic characteristic moderated these effects. Specifically, longer nightly sleep duration predicted higher subsequent academic achievement among children from low-SES (effect size [ES] = 0.07) and average-SES backgrounds (ES = 0.09), whereas longer sleep duration predicted lower subsequent achievement among children from high-SES backgrounds (ES = −0.08). However, these subgroup-specific cross-lagged associations were not robust across alternative weighting specifications and therefore should be interpreted cautiously.