It is 10am on Tuesday, 19 December 2023. The day of the study. The seminar group is small, when everyone is present there are 9 students in total and generally attendance is good. Unfortunately, the day and morning before, 5 out of the 9 students email me to cancel their attendance due to illness or work commitments. It is also the last official day of teaching at the university.

If I could go back in time I would have picked another day to complete this study, but my schedule is tight and I will have to make do with the four students who show up. The first half of the 2.5h seminar is taken up by a student presentation, group discussion and 20 minute break. After the break, I introduce the study. All four students agree to participate. They are interested in sleep and sleepiness and, without me prompting them, they tell anecdotes about being sleepy in class and that they sometimes, particularly during lectures without interaction, they actually snooze off or can feel their head falling just early enough to notice and wake up again, which can lead to awkward situations if you sit close to the lecturer. One student tells about how she tends to be very sleepy all the time, how she almost missed the class this morning because she did not hear her alarm, and how not having breakfast and coffee makes things worse. The students are also excited about the idea of slow pedagogy and pedagogies of care, two topics I will discuss in a future blog-post and want to share with the students when we are back from the winter-break.

After the short introduction the students access the questionnaire which includes participant information and the consent form. The first question asks the students to assess their subjective level of sleepiness with the Stanford Sleepiness Scale (SSS). The SSS was developed by Hoddes et al. (1973) and is a widely used subjective sleepiness measuring instrument in sleep-medical research and for clinical applications. The SSS is a Likert-scale with seven levels of vigilance to evaluate sleepiness at specific moments in time. Consisting of only one item, student-participants are asked to indicate which level best describes their current level of perceived sleepiness. Values are assigned as follows:

1. “Feeling active and vital; alert; wide awake.”
2. “Functioning at a high level, but not at peak; able to concentrate.”
3. “Relaxed; awake; not at full alertness; responsive.”
4. “A little foggy; not at peak; let down.”
5. “Fogginess; beginning to lose interest in remaining awake; slowed down.”
6. “Sleepiness; prefer to be lying down; fighting sleep; woozy.”
7. “Almost in reverie; sleep onset soon; lost struggle to remain awake.”

The second question makes use of the Epworth Sleepiness Scale (ESS) to measure general levels of daytime sleepiness. It was developed by Johns (1991), based on observations of the occurrence of daytime sleepiness. The ESS presents a set of eight situations commonly encountered in daily life. On a scale from 0-3 the students have to likely they are to doze off or fall asleep in the given situations recently. The total score can be between 0-24. I will calculate the score for each participant during analysis. A score of 10 or higher indicates abnormal or pathological sleepiness.

Following the two questions about the subjectively felt levels of sleepiness is a question that asks the students to rank periods of the academic year from when they feel sleepiest to when they feel most awake. I therefore divided the year into summer holidays (July-September), winter semester (October-January), Christmas holidays (December), semester holidays (February), summer semester (March-June) and Easter holidays (April).

The last question is an open question, asking the student-participants to make a list of all the things they consider contributing to feeling tired or sleepy. It specifies to consider things they do (eg. sport, eating, waking up early…), economical factors (eg. deadlines, meetings, work, poverty…), social factors (eg. caring responsibilities, parties, other people, pets…), technological factors (eg. social media, TV…) and environmental factors (eg. temperature, noise…).

After 15 minutes all students are finished answering the questionnaire and we move on to the next stage of the study: the Exquisite Corpse. Since I am teaching in German and all but one student’s mother tongue is German I decided to prepare the prompts for the Exquisite Corpse in German, intending to translate the anecdotes for analysis afterwards. I prepared 7 prompts (an introductory paragraph to how sleepy a fictional student comes to the seminar) – one for each level of sleepiness on the Stanford Sleepiness Scale. Originally I had planned to pass each level around to each student for two minutes of writing each. Since only 4 students showed up for the session I had to change the plan slightly. We did a first round of 4 x 2 minutes of writing starting from the first prompt, then we started a second round of 4 x 2 minutes of writing starting from a second prompt. Therefore the stories turned out a bit shorter than anticipated but we got to cover all levels of sleepiness.

The prompts, one on each paper, read (translated from German):

• “It was a beautiful morning. I felt active and vital, alert and wide awake. In the seminar we discussed a chapter from a book and I…”
• “It was a good morning, I was functioning at a high level and able to concentrate. At the start of the seminar Anna delivered a short lecture and I…”
• “My day started relaxed, during the seminar I reacted to prompts but was not at full alertness. We had to complete individual tasks and I…”
• “Since I woke up that morning I felt a little foggy and not at peak; I felt let down. In the seminar we discussed an article and I…”
• “I felt slower than usual. My mind was foggy and I was beginning to lose interest in remaining awake. It was difficult to concentrate. During the seminar another student delivered a presentation and I…”
• “I felt so sleepy, almost woozy. I was fighting sleep and would have preferred to lie down to sitting on the chair in the seminar. We had to answer questions about an article and I…”
• “I was so tired, almost in reverie; as if I’d lost the struggle to remain awake. I started to have dream-like thoughts. During the seminar we watched a short video and I…”

The writing took the group about 20 minutes and was interrupted by laughter. In an Excquisite Corpse one person starts writing a story (or continue the story initiated by the prompt) and when the 2 minutes are up they are asked to fold the paper over, so that only the last line or sentence remains visible. Then the paper was passed on to the person sitting on the right, and so on, until everyone had the chance to contribute to the story. To direct the writing a little bit towards what I want to investigate I presented some prompts for the students to consider during writing (translated from German):

• How did you behave?
• How did you participate in the seminar?
• How did you handle the workload of your study program?
• Which activities or events influenced your sleep and energy levels?

During the writing there is mostly silence, interrupted by laughter and giggling. When we finished the exercise one student asked wether we could read the texts out loud. I confirmed with all the students in the classroom and they agree. We read four of the eight stories out loud.

References

Hoddes E, Zarcone V, Smythe H, Phillips R, Dement WC. 1973. Quantification of sleepiness: a new approach. Psychophysiology, 1973; 10:431–6.

Johns MW. 1991. A new method for measuring daytime sleepiness: the Epworth Sleepiness Scale. Sleep 1991; 14:540–5.