High school students just aren’t morning people, according to a new study done by Evanston Township High School teacher Martha Hansen and her junior Advanced Placement biology class.

Hansen will present the study at a Society for Neuroscience convention in San Diego in mid-November.

Sixty of 65 students in Hansen’s AP biology class volunteered for the study in fall 2000. They served as both test subjects and researchers.

Three former students of Hansen’s assisted with the project because of their interest in the subject. ETHS seniors Adam Schiff, Laura Min-Proctor and Anne Lionberger are listed as authors of the study.

“The students so often at the high school level are just getting the nuts and bolts,” Hansen said. “(At) that level they don’t often get exposed to why people do science — because it’s interesting.”

The first task for the juniors was to keep a “sleep log,” for which they recorded all sleep including naps. They began keeping the log in August and continued through the beginning of the school year. The study showed that students lost as many as two hours of sleep per weeknight once school started.

The second section of the study attempted to shift the students’ sleep patterns by altering light within the sleeping environment. Hansen set up bright lights to shine on her morning students, expecting the light to adjust the students’ body clocks so that they would be accustomed to being awake in the early morning.

Both morning and afternoon students took computer tests that measured alertness and mental functioning.

Students’ poor early-morning performances on computer tests and responses to mood questionnaires indicated that the light did not cause the expected shift.

Hansen speculated the students were unable to adjust because of the rigidity of their schedules, which might keep them up late at night.

The test results also showed that students perform more poorly in the early morning compared with other times of the day, Hansen said.

Hansen said she believes the students’ curiosity was awakened by the project, and said she was impressed by their overall level of enthusiasm.

“That level of desire and commitment is something we could tap again,” Hansen said. “That work ethic is heartening as a teacher.”

Northwestern was also involved with the project. Margarita Dubocovich of the Department of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Cell Biology at the Northwestern Medical School, was a coordinator between NU and ETHS, and acted as a “scientific adviser,” Dubocovich said.

“The principal investigator was Martha Hansen,” Dubocovich said. “We provided her with everything she needed.”

That included help with setting up the research, choosing methods of data analysis and interpretation of results.

Hansen hopes policy changes will come of this research. She said she is concerned that students are being forced out of a “biologically determined sleep cycle” and becoming sleep-deprived.

Hansen said she knows that changes in school hours would have to come at the state level because of the effect it would have on school sports, among other things. But she said she also is concerned about administering standardized tests in the morning when students are not alert. The time of the tests could be changed, she said.

Hansen said she hopes to publish her paper on the study, which she is currently finishing, in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Dubocovich, who is working with her to complete the analysis of the data and the paper, said she has been impressed.

“It was a very exciting project because we’ve been able to provide these children with guidance on how to perform a research project,” Dubocovich said. “What Martha Hansen has done has been remarkable.”