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Early School Start Times

1270 Words6 Pages

In “Adolescent Sleep, School Start Times, and Teen Motor Vehicle Crashes”, published September of 2008 in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, Fred Danner, a Professor of educational and counseling psychology at the UK College of Education, and Barbara Phillips, a Professor of Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine at the UK College of Medicine, argue that early school start times may increase the likelihood of adolescents crashing their vehicles. Danner and Phillips explain that though it is often complicated and rarely considered, pushing back middle and high school starting times will often result in notably less tired students and increase their sleep time on weekdays. The pair also found later school times, as tested in the metropolitan …show more content…

Three sources are used to support the crucial assertion that teenagers do not get as much sleep as needed to properly function, with an additional three citations to show that this problem worsens throughout high school. Several more sources are referenced to clarify that early school increases student sleepiness, and that drowsy driving is dangerous. With that first paragraph covered, most any reader would be willing to believe extensive research has been done throughout the article and all provided information is accurate. This trend is continued to the second paragraph with another five reputable …show more content…

I consider this to be a severe detriment to the effectiveness of the article. Personally, it is aggravating that Phillips and Danner’s article had no explicit argument; it functioned as informative because their thesis explained how a series of already proven links “may” influence crash rates. Daytime sleepiness might affect crash rates, but sneezing might also affect how Lori Troyer grades this paper. In the spirit of a cum hoc fallacy, no evidence, besides circumstantial, was given to connect these two points. Nevertheless, the article as a whole effectively convinced me that teen tiredness may be a large contributing factor in adolescent safety on the road. Danner and Phillips wrote an excellent article that built a very credible base, which they commendably used to provide and explain a series of surveys and

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