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Source: http://www.facebook.com/rotoworld/posts/146972775442534
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শুক্রবার, ২৪ আগস্ট, ২০১২
What Is Dividend Growth Investing?
In brief?
An income-focused stock selection strategy that involves buying stocks with a long history of increasing dividend payments (known as Dividend Aristocrats or Dividend Champions) and reinvesting any proceeds.?
There is usually a strong Buffettesque focus on the quality of the franchise supporting the business to ensure sustainability of the dividend payment.
Background?
It?s hard to pin down the exact origins of Dividend Growth Investing (DGI). Clearly a recognition of the importance of dividends goes back as far as Benjamin Graham, who wrote ?The prime purpose of a business corporation is to pay dividends to its owners? and beyond, but the strong emphasis on consistent dividend growth is more recent.? In recognition of companies with a 10 year history of increasing dividends, Moody?s Investor Service (now part of Indixis) created the first Handbook of Dividend Achievers in 1983, while Samp;P?s Dividend Aristocrats Index (25+ years of dividend increases) seems to have maintained since at least 1989.??
One of the earliest DGI books was Roxann Klugman?s title, ?The Dividend Growth Investment Strategy?? (published in 2001). Amongst other stories, this book described the investment strategy of Anne Schieber, a ex-government employee who built a $5000 lump sum in 1944 into $22 million by 1995 through dividend reinvestment amp; compounding. Miller Lowell also wrote in detail about DGI in his 2006 book, ?The Single Best Investment: Creating Wealth with Dividend Growth?.?
As a more structured/populist school of investment thinking, Dividend Growth Investing seems to have emerged in recent years out of the blogosphere, via sites like David Van Knapp?s Sensible Stocksand Dividend Growth Investor?and the writings of others like David Fish, Chuck Carnevale and Norman Tweed on social finance site, Seeking Alpha. This article gives some interesting background on its emergence.
Given its recent history, it remains to be seen whether DGI Investing is just a low-interest-rate phenomenon but, so far, its popularity has been mostly confined to the US market (perhaps because many countries do not have the same degree of consistency in their dividend payment culture).?
Investment Strategy?
Dividend Growth Investing involves buying stocks that are committed to growing their dividends over time ? and have a track record for doing just that.? Dividend Growth Investors want dividends that are sustainable and regularly increased. These dividend should be from high quality businesses that are expected to grow profits over a long period of time by selling/manufacturing/distributing products that people want or need every single day.?
Rather than selecting shares with spectacularly high yields (as with the Dividend Dogs), the strategy takes a longer term view and looks for companies whose culture? supports the payment of dividends. The rationale behind this is that:?
- Companies that can grow their dividends are generally more efficient allocators of capital over longer periods.?
- Paying dividends is good discipline for management, as they have to ensure their strategies and actions reward shareholders.
- Dividend payers tend to be less volatile and provide protection against downside.
- Ongoing dividend payments incorporates the advantages of compounding through reinvestment
The DGI approach is intended as a long-term strategy whereby the investor reinvests dividends and buys more of its core holdings over time on price dips.
There tends to be more emphasis on the income stream generated by the portfolio, than the value of the portfolio per se. The idea is that, thanks to compounding through reinvestment of dividends, a portfolio of carefully selected dividend stocks should provide a sufficient income stream to live on in retirement, without the need to touch the principal.?
Views on diversification differ amongst DGI investors ? some people focus hard on diversification, while others hold a concentrated portfolio.?
Screening Criteria
As DGI is a fairly broad church, it?s not easy to say exactly what a typical set of quant. screening criteria might be. However, in this respect, this article by David van Knapp is a useful synthesis?as is this one.?
- Consistent history of dividend increases ? What this means is debatable, of course, but typically the starting point will be the list of Dividend Champions (i.e. companies with a 25+ year record of maintaining or increasing dividends)?on the DRiP Investing Resource Center website.?There is no UK equivalent to our knowledge although? Indxis has recently launched a UK Dividend Achievers index.
- Strong Historic Dividend Growth Rate: This usually involves either a minimum five-year dividend growth rate of 10% or more, or a 10-year dividend growth rate at the same level.?
- A Minimum Dividend Yield: David Crosetti looks for 3% or better, Norman Tweed looks for yields beginning at 4%. If the current dividend yield of an existing holding drops below 3%, this might trigger a decision to sell and deploy the cash elsewhere (see below).
- ?Increased dividend payout yield (either in relattion to earnings per share or free cash flow): This is more controversial since some DGI investors target low payout ratios as a sign of sustainability. However, it ties in with a 2003 study by Robert D. Arnott which found, contrary to received wisdom, that expected future earnings growth is fastest when current dividend payout ratios are high and slowest when payout ratios are low. They noted that ?our evidence contradicts the views of many who believe that? substantial reinvestment of retained earnings will fuel? faster earnings growth?.??
Other more qualitative DGI criteria might be:?
Does DGI investing beat the market?
The evidence as to whether Dividend Growth Investing delivers alpha is fairly mixed. While a number of its supporters have back-tested the performance of the Dividend Champions list, this work is based on a data-set that suffers from significant survivorship bias (as the Champions list does not show companies that cut their dividends or went bankrupt). ?
For US stocks, Kurtis Hemmerling has attempted to back-test the strategy without this bias for 797 companies from 1994 to the beginning of 2012. He found that this strategy delivered a CAGR of 7%, without taking into consideration dividends (which he estimated at 3-4%), i.e. an estimated total return of 10-11%. This compared favourably with a total return CAGR for? Samp;P 500 of 7.71%.??
Contradicting this, though, Larry Swedroe, along with the research team at DFA, analysed the returns from Dividend Growth in the US over a 30 year time period. His work found that, from 1982-2011, the top 20% of dividend growers had an average annual return of 12.5% and a standard deviation of 17.6%, whereas the index had an average return of 12.3% and a standard deviation of 17.7% (i.e. the difference wasn?t statistically significant). You can read an interesting debate between Swedroe and a DGI supporter here.?
One international study by Cass University of UK stocks, ?Consistent Dividend Growth Investment Strategies? examined data for LSE from 1975-2006 (summarised?here). It found that firms with in excess of 10-years consistent dividend growth (especially small-caps) returned considerably more than the equity market as a whole, with the additional benefits of lower volatility and smaller drawdowns.?
We?ll be tracking a DGI screen shortly for UK stocks as part of?Stockopedia PRO?- in the interim, here?s a more? simplistic?Dividend Achievers screen.?
What to watch out for
As blogger Financial Uproar writes,? the proponents of dividend growth investing can sometimes appear somewhat myopic (and arguably even?unbalanced) in their focus on dividend growth to the exclusion of other concerns:?
?I like dividends too. The problem is with the almost singular focus on it. As long as a company is growing the bottom line and their investors get that yearly dividend hike, dividend growth investors are happy to buy, all other metrics be damned. Paying $10 for every $1 in assets? THAT?S ALL GOODWILL BABY! Buying at a 52 week high? WHO CARES, DADDY LIKES DIVIDENDS.
One thing to be wary of is that DGI literature tends to be rife with claims that dividends account for 90% of the Stock Return.?There?s lots of research highlighting the importance of dividend reinvestment ? e.g. an Ibbotson study found that it made up 40% of total stock returns from 1926 to 2006 and studies shows that it can be as high as 90% in bear markets. However, the idea that dividends generally make up 90% of stock returns ? apparently taken from Daniel Peris? book ?The Strategic Dividend Investor? ? has been fairly comprehensively debunked as specious by Crossing Wall Street.?As he writes:?
?The hitch is that the claim is that 90% of returns are derived from dividends, not specifically dividends themselves. This is a bit of logical sleight-of-hand. The problem is that this sleight-of-hand doesn?t reveal any important truths. Instead, it makes a point which is ultimately irrelevant? Let?s take a stock that at the beginning of the year pays a 5% dividend. During the year, the dividend is increased by 10%. Let?s say that the stock also rises by 10% during the year. Well, Paris et al claim that the 10% stock rise is derived by the dividend payment since the shares are merely keeping up with the dividend. Ergo, the return derived from dividends is the 5% dividend plus the 10% stock increase. In other words, all of the stock?s returns (15% out of 15%) are derived from dividends?.
When to Sell / Realise Profits
Views on when to sell differ amongst DGI investors. Some people actually sell positions when they feel that a company may be overvalued. van Knapp normally aims for? 3% minimum current yield, otherwise he would look to redeploy the proceeds into other stocks with higher current yields. Some people claim to never sell unless there is a fundamental issue with the company and/or a stock suspends or reduces its dividend.?
Rather than the typical 4% selling rule used for retirement planning, the thinking amongst DGI investors is that the dividend income generated naturally by the assets should be all that is removed from the investment account. On this view, price falls (or even a bad economy) should pose no particular threat, because there is little correlation between dividends and stock prices.?
From The Source
While there?s no one central DGI text, it?s well worth referring to David van Knapp?s book, ?Sensible Stock Investment: How to Pick, Value, and Manage Stocks? (updated each year since 2008) as that covers a lot of the thinking. This is available on Amazon or from his website. See also Roxann Klugman?s title, ??The Dividend Growth Investment Strategy?? (published in 2001).?See also these articles from Seeking Alpha:?
It?s also worth referring to the Dividend Champions document?maintained by David Fish on the DRiP Investing Resource Center. Known as CCC, this document lists US stocks that have consistently grown their dividends for at least five years (Challengers), 10 years (Contenders), or 25 years (Champions).
Further Reading
?
Source: http://www.dailymarkets.com/stock/2012/08/23/what-is-dividend-growth-investing/
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বৃহস্পতিবার, ২৩ আগস্ট, ২০১২
Child abuse action plan already slammed : Family First NZ
Posted by Bob on Thursday, August 23, 2012
3 News 23 Aug 2012
The Government?s ?action plan? to tackle child abuse and illness is being described as a rehash of previously-announced goals which avoid the real issues. Social Development Minister Paula Bennett, Health Minister Tony Ryall and Education Minister Hekia Parata launched the Supporting Vulnerable Children Action Plan at Parliament on Wednesday.
It includes:
* halting the rise in child abuse by 2017 and reducing current levels by five per cent
* increasing infant immunisation rates to 95 percent of eight-month-olds by December 2014
* reducing the incidence of rheumatic fever by two-thirds by June 2017
* increasing participation in early-childhood education to 98 percent in 2016.
The policies are not new ? their funding was announced in the May budget.
?.Labour has replied with a statement from three of its senior MPs ? social development spokeswoman Jacinda Ardern, health spokeswoman Maryan Street and early childhood education spokeswoman Sue Moroney. ?This shows the Government is out of ideas and is desperately trying to avoid the real issues facing parents and children,? they said. ?It?s ambulance at the bottom of the cliff stuff? the Government is focusing on intervention rather than prevention.? The MPs say the government isn?t dealing with the rising cost of early childhood education that cuts thousands of children out the system and isn?t tackling the causes of illnesses like poor quality housing. ?Until it does, initiatives such as this will be little more than words and good intentions,? they said.
http://www.3news.co.nz/Child-abuse-action-plan-already-slammed/tabid/1607/articleID/266453/Default.aspx
Source: http://familyfirst.org.nz/2012/08/child-abuse-action-plan-already-slammed/
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South Africa memorial service for dead miners hijacked by fiery politician
MARIKANA, South Africa - A fiery politician cast out of the ruling party Thursday hijacked the main memorial service for 34 striking miners killed by police, to accuse President Jacob Zuma's government of complicity in the shootings. Angry government ministers walked out.
Zuma did not attend any of the services. He called a news conference to announce a retired supreme court judge will head a judicial commission of inquiry to investigate "the facts and circumstances which gave rise to the use of force and whether this was reasonable and justifiable in the particular circumstances."
He announced a wide range of issues for the commission to investigate, including the role of London-registered Lonmin PLC, which owns the platinum mine where the violence was sparked by union rivalry.
The commission would look at Lonmin's conduct and report "whether the company, by act or omission, created an environment which was conducive to the creation of tension, labour unrest, disunity among its employees or other harmful conduct," Zuma said.
The somber and grieving tone of the memorial service at the mine was shattered by Julius Malema, who was expelled in April for sowing disunity in the African National Congress. Malema was applauded when he said the government has not intervened in the mines "because our leaders are involved in these mines." He said that President Zuma's foundation and other ANC leaders have shares in the mines.
"Our government has become a pig that is eating its children," charged Malema.
Malema's outburst came after church leaders had urged people not to use the memorial service to score political points.
About a dozen Cabinet ministers left before they could address the crowd of more than 1,000 at the mine at Marikana, 70 kilometers (40 miles) northwest of Johannesburg.
Last week's shootings were the worst display of state violence since apartheid ended in 1994 and have thrown the spotlight on growing anger at South Africa's massive inequality, poverty and unemployment.
The violence unfolded as some 3,000 rock drill operators demanded a minimum wage of 12,500 rand ($1,560). The poorest 10 percent of the population shares 1.1 billion rand ($137.5 million) while the country's richest 10 percent has 381 billion (nearly $48 billion), the Congress of South African Trade Unions noted Thursday.
In a statement it claimed Lonmin's financial officer is paid 152 times as much as a rock drill operator at the mine. It claimed the operators earn only 5,600 rand ($700) though researchers who work with miners say they make at least 10,000 rand ($1,250).
The relative of a miner killed in last week's shootings said he wants to see some arrests.
"If it were me I'd want everyone who was involved in this incident including the mine managers to be arrested, the whole lot of them, because a person's life is not worth money," Ubuntu Akumelisine told the AP.
Mungiswa Mphumza, the sister of a dead miner from Eastern Cape, said she was at peace.
"We have accepted everything that has happened and we ask that the dead rest in peace, there is nothing that we can do at the moment, what has happened has happened. God takes what he likes," Mphumza said.
Roger Phillimore, chairman of Lonmin PLC mine company, also offered condolences to the the mourners.
"It is with huge sadness that I join with you to mourn the loss of so many of our colleagues. It is unquestionably the saddest loss in the history of this company," Philimore said.
This was the first time since the shooting that a high-ranking Lonmin official addressed the miners and their community.
Zuma had decreed a week of national mourning to honor all victims of violence in South Africa, which has which has one of the world's highest murder and rape rates.
In the past week, three orphan children were stoned to death, with a 12-year-old girl among them raped, and a pastor is on trial for allegedly raping and molesting nine children in his wife's nursery school.
At the mine, strikers who captured two police officers hacked them to death with machetes. Strikers also set ablaze a car carrying two mine security guards, burning them alive.
Another six people died in the week before police fired volleys of gunfire at a group of charging miners, killing 34 and wounding 78.
"This ongoing violence is a part of our national and collective shame and we should take this time to seriously reflect on the state of our society," Prof. Yunus Ballim of Witwatersrand University said before students and lecturers marched in memory of victims of violence.
On Wednesday, Zuma demanded that mine companies provide decent homes and sanitation for miners. He singled out one mining house where 666 workers share four toilets and four showers, according to the Star newspaper. He did not name the company.
Zuma warned that those who do not comply with the Mining Charter requiring adequate housing risk losing their licenses.
Lonmin, the mine where the violence happened, remained shut down to honor the day of mourning.
Source: http://www.startribune.com/world/167166975.html
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Future memory: Ferroelectric materials could bring down cost of cloud computing and electronic devices
ScienceDaily (Aug. 22, 2012) ? A new class of organic materials developed at Northwestern University boasts a very attractive but elusive property: ferroelectricity. The crystalline materials also have a great memory, which could be very useful in computer and cellphone memory applications, including cloud computing.
A team of organic chemists discovered they could create very long crystals with desirable properties using just two small organic molecules that are extremely attracted to each other. The attraction between the two molecules causes them to self assemble into an ordered network -- order that is needed for a material to be ferroelectric.
The starting compounds are simple and inexpensive, making the lightweight materials scalable and very promising for technology applications. In contrast, conventional ferroelectric materials -- special varieties of polymers and ceramics -- are complex and expensive to produce. The Northwestern materials can be made quickly and are very versatile.
In addition to computer memory, the discovery of the Northwestern materials could potentially improve sensing devices, solar energy systems and nanoelectronics. The study was published Aug. 23 by the journal Nature.
"This work will serve as a guide for designing these materials and using ferroelectricity in new ways," said Samuel I. Stupp, Board of Trustees Professor of Chemistry, Materials Science and Engineering, and Medicine. He is a senior author of the paper. "Our molecular design enables us to invent a nearly infinite library of ferroelectric materials."
Ferroelectric materials exhibit spontaneous electric polarization (making one side of the material positive and the opposite side negative) that can be reversed by the application of an electric field (from a battery, for example). These two possible orientations make the materials attractive to researchers developing computer memory because one orientation could correspond to a 1 and the other to a 0. (Computer memory stores information in 1's and 0's.)
"The material's behavior is complex, but the superstructure is simple," said Sir Fraser Stoddart, Board of Trustees Professor of Chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern. He also is a senior author. "It is the superstructure that gives the material its desirable properties."
The two first authors of the paper are Alok Tayi, a former graduate student in Stupp's lab and now a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, and Alexander Shveyd, a former graduate student in Stoddart's lab and now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Rochester.
These new supramolecular materials derive their properties from the specific interaction, repeated over and over again between two small alternating organic molecules, not from the molecules themselves. The two complementary molecules interact electronically and so strongly that they come close together and form very long crystals. This highly ordered 3-D network is based on hydrogen bonds.
In particular, the materials could help address the very expensive upkeep of cloud computing. Facebook, Google, Web-based email and other services are stored in the cloud and rely on volatile memory. When the power is turned off, volatile memory forgets the information it's holding. So the power has to be kept on.
The new ferroelectric materials could be developed into non-volatile memory. With this type of memory, if the power is turned off, the information is retained. If the cloud and electronic devices operated on non-volatile memory, $6 billion in electricity costs would be saved in the U.S. annually, the researchers said.
Current non-volatile computer memories are not based on ferroelectrics. But ferroelectric memories promise to consume less power, last longer and capture data faster than conventional non-volatile memories.
As so often happens in science, serendipity played a role in this discovery of super long crystals. Shveyd was trying to make boxlike molecular rings, but this outcome was never observed. Instead, he stumbled upon the interesting crystals.
"This discovery effectively opened up a Pandora's box," Stoddart said. "Alex started working with Alok in Stupp's group, and the two of them took advantage of the interactions between the two building blocks. They optimized the design so they could grow very long crystals with ferroelectric properties."
"The interaction between the molecules is very strong -- almost like a key in a lock," Shveyd said. "They fit very well together. This interaction produces ferroelectricity, which, to our great surprise, happened at room temperature."
This type of interaction between two molecules previously had been found to give rise to ferroelectricity in three other materials but only below liquid nitrogen temperatures. The new materials developed at Northwestern include additional interactions that enable this property to occur for the first time at room temperature and above.
The new material is all about electron exchange between two small molecules. One molecule is the donor of electrons (red), and the other is the acceptor of electrons (blue). The red and blue molecules are arranged in a mixed stack, and one type alternates with the other. Within that network, each molecule partners with a neighbor and exchanges electrons. Then an electric field is applied, prompting the molecules to switch partners, like dancers on a dance floor. This switch of partners produces ferroelectricity.
The research team developed a library of 10 complexes with this architecture. Three are reported in the Nature paper. The crystals are based on complexes between a pyromellitic diimide-acceptor and donors that are derivatives of naphthalene, pyrene and tetrathiafulvalene.
"The simplicity of our system demonstrates how self-assembly can endow materials with novel functions," Tayi said. "We hope our work motivates chemists and engineers to explore ferroelectricity in organic materials."
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Northwestern University, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
- Alok S. Tayi, Alexander K. Shveyd, Andrew C.-H. Sue, Jodi M. Szarko, Brian S. Rolczynski, Dennis Cao, T. Jackson Kennedy, Amy A. Sarjeant, Charlotte L. Stern, Walter F. Paxton, Wei Wu, Sanjeev K. Dey, Albert C. Fahrenbach, Jeffrey R. Guest, Hooman Mohseni, Lin X. Chen, Kang L. Wang, J. Fraser Stoddart, Samuel I. Stupp. Room-temperature ferroelectricity in supramolecular networks of charge-transfer complexes. Nature, 2012; 488 (7412): 485 DOI: 10.1038/nature11395
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/EU-Db6bNqVc/120822131214.htm
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Faculty welcomes thousands on Open Day - Business & Economics ...
Thousands of students flocked to the Faculty on Open Day where academic, professional and volunteer staff addressed queries on studying at Australia?s number one university.
A passion to learn more was evident in The Spot on Open Day
From 10am prospective students made their way to The Spot and over the course of the day what was evident was that there was a huge interest in in studying the BCom. Lectures halls overflowed as academics gave BCom information and discipline specific information sessions. Passionate and friendly staff from the various departments sought to answer a wide variety of queries from banking to scholarships to the student experience.? Staff from the Commerce Student Centre tirelessly answered questions about? the BCom while on level one the GSBE crew were keep continuously busy as students sought answers on graduate and executive education.
A superb atmosphere was a dominant feature of the day and the recent announcement that the University was once again confirmed at the leading University in Australiaand the Faculty was the leading Business & Economics School in the country assisted in the buoyant mood.
Overflowing lecture halls was a feature of the introduction to economics information session
In total 60,000 people visited the University on Open Day and the welcoming atmosphere was also striking on the main campus. The sound stage on South Lawn proved popular as student musicians from the Faculty of the VCA and MCM entertained guests. At Southbank, open mic and jam sessions engaged the audience while visitors also sat in on dance, drama and music theatre classes.
A new feature at the Faculty was the cool use of a photo booth that proved very popular
An innovative feature of this year?s Open Day was the use of an online planner to help visitors extract the most from their Open Day experience. Before the event, prospective visitors drafted a personal itinerary on the Open Day 2012 website. Thousands of personal itineraries were created in this way, with tens of thousands of individual information sessions added by visitors.
While Open Day is over for this year its impact around the Faculty is still evident as staff reminisce on a re invigorating day in the academic calendar when we loudly and warmly welcome those interested in further study at this remarkable University.
The Clubs & Socs were out in force to show their strength
Even the King made an appearance on Open Day
Source: http://benews.unimelb.edu.au/2012/faculty-welcomes-thousands-on-open-day/
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Cramming for a test? Don't do it, say UCLA researchers
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Public release date: 22-Aug-2012[ | E-mail |
Share ] Contact: Mark Wheeler
mwheeler@mednet.ucla.edu
310-794-2265
University of California - Los Angeles
Every high school kid has done it: putting off studying for that exam until the last minute, then pulling a caffeine-fueled all-nighter in an attempt to cram as much information into their heads as they can.
Now, new research at UCLA says don't bother.
The problem is the trade-off between study and sleep. Studying, of course, is a key contributor to academic achievement, but what students may fail to appreciate is that adequate sleep is also important for academics, researchers say.
In the study, UCLA professor of psychiatry Andrew J. Fuligni, UCLA graduate student Cari Gillen-O'Neel and colleagues report that sacrificing sleep for extra study time, whether it's cramming for a test or plowing through a pile of homework, is actually counterproductive. Regardless of how much a student generally studies each day, if that student sacrifices sleep time in order to study more than usual, he or she is likely to have more academic problems, not less, on the following day.
The study findings appear in the current online edition of the journal Child Development.
"No one is suggesting that students shouldn't study," said Fuligni, the study's senior author. "But an adequate amount of sleep is also critical for academic success. These results are consistent with emerging research suggesting that sleep deprivation impedes leaning."
Students generally learn best when they keep a consistent study schedule, Fuligni said. Although a steady pace of learning is ideal, the increasing demands that high school students face may make such a consistent schedule difficult. Socializing with peers and working, for example, both increase across the course of high school. So do academic obligations like homework that require more time and effort.
As a result, many high school students end up with irregular study schedules, often facing nights in which they need to spend substantially more time than usual studying or completing school work.
Yet, Fuligni said, "The biologically needed hours of sleep remain constant through their high school years, even as the average amount of sleep students get declines."
Other research has shown that in ninth grade, the average adolescent sleeps 7.6 hours per night, then declines to 7.3 hours in 10th grade, 7.0 hours in 11th grade and 6.9 hours in 12th grade.
"So kids start high school getting less sleep then they need, and this lack of sleep gets worse over the course of high school," Fuligni said.
For the current study, 535 Latino, Asian American and European American students in the ninth, 10th and 12th grades were recruited from three Los Angelesarea high schools. They were asked to keep a diary for a 14-day period, recording how long they studied, how long they slept and whether or not they experienced two academic problems: not understanding something taught the following day in class and performing poorly on a test, quiz or homework.
Across the board, the researchers found that study time became increasingly associated with more academic problems, because longer study hours generally meant fewer hours of sleep. In turn, that predicted greater academic problems the following day.
"At first, it was somewhat surprising to find that in the latter years of high school, cramming tended to be followed by days with more academic problems," said Gillen-O'Neel, who works with Fuligni and was the study's first author. "But then it made sense once we examined extra studying in the context of sleep. Although we expected that cramming might not be as effective as students think, our results showed that extra time spent studying cut into sleep. And it's this reduced sleep that accounts for the increase in academic problems that occurs after days of increased studying."
Of course, those students who averaged more study time overall tended to receive higher grades in school. But, said Fuligni, "Academic success may depend on finding strategies to avoid having to give up sleep to study, such as maintaining a consistent study schedule across days, using school time as efficiently as possible and sacrificing time spent on other, less essential activities."
###
Virginia W. Huynh, also of UCLA, was a co-author of the study. None of the authors report any conflict of interest. Support for this study was provided by the Russell Sage Foundation.
The UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences is the home within the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA for faculty who are experts in the origins and treatment of disorders of complex human behavior. The department is part of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, a world-leading interdisciplinary research and education institute devoted to the understanding of complex human behavior and the causes and consequences of neuropsychiatric disorders.
For more news, visit the UCLA Newsroom and follow us on Twitter.
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Public release date: 22-Aug-2012[ | E-mail |
Share ] Contact: Mark Wheeler
mwheeler@mednet.ucla.edu
310-794-2265
University of California - Los Angeles
Every high school kid has done it: putting off studying for that exam until the last minute, then pulling a caffeine-fueled all-nighter in an attempt to cram as much information into their heads as they can.
Now, new research at UCLA says don't bother.
The problem is the trade-off between study and sleep. Studying, of course, is a key contributor to academic achievement, but what students may fail to appreciate is that adequate sleep is also important for academics, researchers say.
In the study, UCLA professor of psychiatry Andrew J. Fuligni, UCLA graduate student Cari Gillen-O'Neel and colleagues report that sacrificing sleep for extra study time, whether it's cramming for a test or plowing through a pile of homework, is actually counterproductive. Regardless of how much a student generally studies each day, if that student sacrifices sleep time in order to study more than usual, he or she is likely to have more academic problems, not less, on the following day.
The study findings appear in the current online edition of the journal Child Development.
"No one is suggesting that students shouldn't study," said Fuligni, the study's senior author. "But an adequate amount of sleep is also critical for academic success. These results are consistent with emerging research suggesting that sleep deprivation impedes leaning."
Students generally learn best when they keep a consistent study schedule, Fuligni said. Although a steady pace of learning is ideal, the increasing demands that high school students face may make such a consistent schedule difficult. Socializing with peers and working, for example, both increase across the course of high school. So do academic obligations like homework that require more time and effort.
As a result, many high school students end up with irregular study schedules, often facing nights in which they need to spend substantially more time than usual studying or completing school work.
Yet, Fuligni said, "The biologically needed hours of sleep remain constant through their high school years, even as the average amount of sleep students get declines."
Other research has shown that in ninth grade, the average adolescent sleeps 7.6 hours per night, then declines to 7.3 hours in 10th grade, 7.0 hours in 11th grade and 6.9 hours in 12th grade.
"So kids start high school getting less sleep then they need, and this lack of sleep gets worse over the course of high school," Fuligni said.
For the current study, 535 Latino, Asian American and European American students in the ninth, 10th and 12th grades were recruited from three Los Angelesarea high schools. They were asked to keep a diary for a 14-day period, recording how long they studied, how long they slept and whether or not they experienced two academic problems: not understanding something taught the following day in class and performing poorly on a test, quiz or homework.
Across the board, the researchers found that study time became increasingly associated with more academic problems, because longer study hours generally meant fewer hours of sleep. In turn, that predicted greater academic problems the following day.
"At first, it was somewhat surprising to find that in the latter years of high school, cramming tended to be followed by days with more academic problems," said Gillen-O'Neel, who works with Fuligni and was the study's first author. "But then it made sense once we examined extra studying in the context of sleep. Although we expected that cramming might not be as effective as students think, our results showed that extra time spent studying cut into sleep. And it's this reduced sleep that accounts for the increase in academic problems that occurs after days of increased studying."
Of course, those students who averaged more study time overall tended to receive higher grades in school. But, said Fuligni, "Academic success may depend on finding strategies to avoid having to give up sleep to study, such as maintaining a consistent study schedule across days, using school time as efficiently as possible and sacrificing time spent on other, less essential activities."
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Virginia W. Huynh, also of UCLA, was a co-author of the study. None of the authors report any conflict of interest. Support for this study was provided by the Russell Sage Foundation.
The UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences is the home within the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA for faculty who are experts in the origins and treatment of disorders of complex human behavior. The department is part of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, a world-leading interdisciplinary research and education institute devoted to the understanding of complex human behavior and the causes and consequences of neuropsychiatric disorders.
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Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-08/uoc--cfa082212.php
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