. “In fact, 20% to 25% of adolescents report feeling sleepy during the day” (Pagel, Forister & Kwiatkowki, 2007; Roehrs, Carskadon, Dement & Roth, 2005).

1. 1
INTRODUCTION
1.0 BACKGROUND:
Topic: Sleep deprivation among CFSIIUM students.
Sleep deprivation can be defined as the condition of not having enough sleep. It
can be either chronic or acute. A chronic sleep-restricted state can cause fatigue, daytime
sleepiness, clumsiness and weight loss or weight gain. It adversely affects the brain and
cognitive function. “Sleep is an active, repetitive, and reversible state of perceptual
disengagement in which a person is unresponsive to the environment” (Carskadon &
Dement, 2005). Teenagers should take a sufficient night rest in order to ensure that they
are ready to start the next day energetically. However, our teenagers today are more
likely to be involved in sleep deprivation. “In fact, 20% to 25% of adolescents report
feeling sleepy during the day” (Pagel, Forister & Kwiatkowki, 2007; Roehrs, Carskadon,
Dement & Roth, 2005). The technology is one of the causes of sleep deprivation. Most of
the teenagers will spend their nights to play games, surf the Internet to meet their friends
on-line and watch the movies in the YouTube. This situation changed their sleep patterns
and might affect their performances during the daytime. As to support, Wolfson and
Carskadon (1998) claimed that, “Despite having a physiological need for 9 hours of sleep
each night, teenagers’ average approximately 7 hours”. When they do not get enough
sleep at night, their health might be harmed. Hence, this study is being conducted based

2. 2
on the aim to explore CFS IIUM students’ perception about the causes and effects of a
sleep deprivation.
2.0 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM:
As we usually seen in this Centre for Foundation Studies, International Islamic
University Malaysia (CFS IIUM), most of the students are more favor to sleep late at
night. They prefer to sleep late to do tons of assignments, go on-line, chit-chatting with
friends, loitering, reading novels, watching movies, playing games and others rather than
sleep earlier to ensure that they can wake up initially in the morning to go to the lecture.
When they do not get a sufficient sleep at night, they might be overslept and being late to
attend the class. Things can be worse when they become sleepy in the class as the impact
of the late-night sleep. They cannot give a full concentration in the class as they are
sleepy and this may decline their academic performance. Similarly, the sleep deprivation
is able to change the students’ sleep pattern. They will use the daytime to sleep since they
did not sleep at night and this change might leave a bad impact to their health. Besides,
their image will be scratched if this situation happens continuously and other people may
not be able to respect them if they do not change their habit. Subsequently, awareness on
the sleep deprivation should be created among students to avoid them from being
involved in this complex problem. Therefore, this study is being conducted to explore
CFS IIUM students’ perception about the effects of a sleep deprivation.

3. 3
3.0 OBJECTIVES:
This study is conducted based on two objectives:
 To investigate whether CFS IIUM students experience sleep deprivation.
 To identify how a sleep deprivation affects the students during the
daytime.
Literature Review:
The development of technology in our country rose continuously from time to
time. It is undeniable that the technology brings many benefits to human. Without
technology, people cannot live comfortably and effectively as it fastens the speed of a
work and eases the tasks. As an example, people need to use the technologies in order
to build buildings. It may take a longer time for us to build the buildings without
using technologies and the process might be harder. However, technology also
brought a pool of problems in human lives. One of the problems created by
technology is sleep deprivation. “Electronics are making it very enticing to stay up
later”, Charles A. Czeisler, M.D., a co-author and the director of division of sleep
medicine at Harvard’s Bringham & Women’s Hospital in Boston said. Hence, several
studies were found to identify the sleep deprivation and how it affects our teenagers.
First of all, Seblewngel Lemma, Bizu Gelaye, Yemane Berhane, Alemayehu
Worku and Michelle A Williams (2012) assessed sleep quality and its demographic

4. 4
and psychological correlates among university students. They used undergraduate
regular students from second year to final year in two universities (Haramaya
University, in Eastern Ethiopia and University of Gondar in North West Ethiopia) in
Ethiopia as the subjects collected the data using a self-administered structured
questionnaire including the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), the Depression
Anxiety Stress Scale-21, the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) and selected modules of
the World Health Organization STEPS. The result shown the prevalence of poor sleep
quality was 55.8%. Female students, second year and third year students had
statistically significant higher odds of poor sleep quality. Perceived stress level and
symptoms of depression and anxiety were strongly associated with sleep quality.
In contrast, Abhinav Dixit, Rajat Thawani, Abhishek Goyal and Neelam Vaney
(2012) assessed the changes in performance, due to 24 hours of sleep deprivation, in
medical students which consisted of 30 undergraduate students in the age group of
18–25 years. The data was collected using simple paper–pencil tasks, such as digit
symbol substitution test, digit vigilance test, and letter cancellation tasks and the
results revealed an increase in the number of errors in letter cancellation tasks and
digit vigilance test, with a significant decrease in the number of correct responses on
the letter cancellation task. The time taken to complete the tests increased with lack of
sleep, with the digit symbol substitution test being affected the most.

5. 5
Besides, Tsui and Wing (2009) investigated sleep patterns and problems of
university business students using the undergraduate Chinese business students in
Hong Kong as the subjects to this study. They analyzed their data by having self-
reported questionnaires which were completed during class lectures and through
online system. The result that they found is the sleep duration was significantly
shorter during weekdays (6.9 hours) than weekends (8.6 hours) among the 620
participating students (mean age 19.9 years). Two thirds of students reported sleep
deprivation. The following factors were associated with being a “poor sleeper”:
attending early morning lectures, living on-campus, sleep debt and minor psychiatric
disturbances.
Similarly, Nizar Souissi, Bruno Sesboue, Antoine Gauthier Jacques Larue and
Damien Davenne (2003) determined the effect of one night’s sleep deprivation on
anaerobic performance in the morning and afternoon of the following day. Thirteen
healthy male physical education students were recruited as the subjects. Then, an
experiment was done as the data collection instrument. The result was the analysis of
variance revealed a significant (sleep × time of day of test) interaction effect on
Ppeak, Pmean and Pmax. These variables improved significantly from morning to
afternoon after reference night (RN) and sleep deprivation condition (SDN). The
reference night was followed by a greater improvement than the SDN. Up to 24 h of
waking, anaerobic power variables were not affected; however, they were impaired
after 36 hours without sleep. Analysis of variance revealed that blood lactate

6. 6
concentrations were unaffected by sleep loss, by time of day of testing or by the
interaction of the two.
Finally, K E Lewis, M Blagrove and P Ebden (2002) determined whether sleep
deprivation affects not only junior doctors’ performance in answering medical
questions but whether their ability to judge their own performance is also affected by
lack of sleep. They enlisted thirty six volunteers (age 24-34 years) from the junior
medical staff in two district general hospitals in South Wales as the participants. The
questionnaire was used to collect the data needed in this study. The result showed that
senior house officers (SHOs) answered significantly more questions correctly and
were more confident than house officers when they were either correct or incorrect.
Length of unbroken or continuous sleep is associated with more correct answers and
higher energy and confidence scores self-rated by the profile of mood states. Length
of continuous sleep was not related to the appropriateness of confidence, as measured
by the “within-subject confidence-accuracy correlation”.
Based on the above studies, it can be concluded that most of the teenagers all over
the world are experiencing sleep deprivation. This situation is not good for their well-
beings as it may bring them a lot of problems in the future. Therefore, a study is being
conducted to investigate whether the students of Centre for Foundation Studies,
International Islamic University Malaysia (CFS IIUM) are experiencing sleep
deprivation or not and if they are, how it affects them.

7. 7
METHODOLOGY
1.0 PARTICIPANTS
The study was conducted on 30 students of Centre for Foundation Studies,
International Islamic University Malaysia (CFS IIUM). The survey was distributed
randomly to the students with the age ranged from 18-21 years old.
2.0 RESEARCH INSTRUMENT
Questionnaire is a pre-formulated written set of questions to which the respondent
records the answers, usually within rather closely delineated alternatives (Sekaran,
2003). Questionnaires can be distributed personally, mail or electronically to the
respondents. The questionnaires were divided into two sections; Section 1 and Section 2.
a) Section 1 consists of the demography questions which are:
- Gender
- Programme
b) Section 2 consists of 6 questions which were related to the objectives of the study.
The first three questions were related to the first objective which is to investigate
whether CFS IIUM students experience sleep deprivation, while the last three
questions were designed for the second objective which is to identify how a sleep
deprivation affects the students during the daytime.

8. 8
3.0 RESEARCH PROCEDURE
In this research project, the data was collected using questionnaires. The
questionnaires were collected using two ways. Firstly, the questionnaires were distributed
randomly to the students in the library. The researcher gave the respondents the
questionnaires and left them within five minutes to allow them to answer the questions.
After five minutes, the questionnaires were collected. Secondly, researcher asked
students who had been targeted to answer those questionnaires. This action was not done
in a fixed place. Researcher met the respondents in different places at different times,
based on the agreement made between researcher and the respondents. In addition,
researcher also collected the data from the previous researches. These researches were
obtained from the journals and the Internet.
4.0 DATA ANALYSIS, FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
The purposes of analyzing data are to getting a feel for the data, testing the
goodness of data, and testing the hypotheses developed for the research (Sekaran, 2003).
The data was analyzed by identifying the perception of students of CFS IIUM towards
sleep deprivation and the effects of sleep deprivation onto them. The totals of 32
questionnaires have been distributed randomly to 32 respondents in the library and
outside the library. Finding ‘a’ and ‘b’ represent the demography questions, while the rest
are related to the objectives.

9. 9
a) Gender.
Figure 1.0
This data is analyzed in a pie chart. From the above figure, 53 percent respondents
out of 32 respondents in this study are female. And the rest 47 percent respondents
are male.
This frequency has shown that number of female participated in this study is
larger rather than the number of male participated in this study.
b) Programme.
Figure 2.0
47%
53%
Gender
Male
Female
53%
47%
Programme
Arts
Sciences

10. 10
The data is also analyzed in a pie chart. The above figure indicates that 53
percent of respondents are taking art programme. Another 47 percent are sciences
programme students.
This illustrates that most of the respondents are art programme students.
However, the number of respondent does not vary much between these two different
programmes. The difference in percentage among these two is just 6 percent.
c) Time students sleep at night.
Figure 3.0
This data is displayed in a bar chart. Based on this bar chart, it is clearly shown
that most of the students in this centre used to sleep between 12.01 a.m.-2 a.m. Besides,
31.20 percent out of 32 respondents prefer to sleep around 2.01 a.m.-4 a.m. 9.40 percent
out of the 32 respondents sleep at 10.01 p.m.-12 a.m. every night while another 9.40
percent respondents sleep at 4.01 a.m. and above.
This question acts as a leading question towards knowing whether CFS IIUM
students are experiencing sleep deprivation or not. Based on the data above, most of the
9.40%
50%
31.20%
9.40%
0.00% 10.00% 20.00% 30.00% 40.00% 50.00% 60.00%
10.01p.m.-12 a.m.
12.01a.m.-2a.m.
2.01a.m.-4a.m.
4.01a.m. and above
10.01p.m.-12 a.m. 12.01a.m.-2a.m.
2.01a.m.-4a.m. 4.01a.m. and above

11. 11
students are used to sleep late at night. When they sleep behind the schedule at night, they
have the high potential to experience sleep deprivation if they do not sleep sufficiently.
Similarly, a study made by K E Lewis, M Blagrove and P Ebden (2002) suggested that
junior doctor undergoing sleep deprivation when on-call, have significant sleepiness and
lowered general confidence. Usually, students who sleep early will rise early too but
somehow, there are students who sleep initially at night but wake up belatedly in the
morning. This condition will affect their sleep quantity.
d) Quantity of sleep time among students.
Figure 4.0
The data is represented in a column chart. The chart above shows that the majority of
the students used to sleep at 7-5 hours per day by 59.40 percent. There are 25 percent of
respondents who sleep between 4-2 hours per day. About 9.40 percent of students sleep at
10-8 hours in a day. However, there are 6.20 percent out of 32 respondents sleep less than
2 hours in a day.
9.40%
59.40%
25%
6.20%
0.00%
10.00%
20.00%
30.00%
40.00%
50.00%
60.00%
70.00%
10-8 hrs 7-5 hrs 4-2 hrs Less than 2 hrs
10-8 hrs 7-5 hrs 4-2 hrs Less than 2 hrs

12. 12
This question was asked to verify the first objective which aimed to identify whether
the students in this centre are experiencing sleep deprivation. Often, students who get a
sufficient sleep will become more energetic in the morning since they sleep sufficiently at
night. In contrast, Dorrian et al found that 18 volunteer could still self monitor and
predict their performances, even when sleep derived for up to 28 hours. It is a normal
view to see students sleep late at night. There are a lot of activities that they do which led
them towards late-night sleeping habits.
e) Activities done by students when they sleep late at night.
Figure 5.0
The data is tabulated in a doughnut chart. It can be clearly seen from the figure
above that most of the students in this centre used their time at night to study by 41
percent. Besides, 21 percent out of 32 respondents preferred to do other activities
rather than study, surf the Internet, watch movie and play games at night. 14 percent
41%
12%
12%
14%
21%
Activities
Study
Surfing Internet
Watching movie
Play games
Others

13. 13
of the respondents play games to fill up their time. While another two activities reach
the same percentage which is 12 percent for each of them.
This question was aimed for the first objective. It is to explore the activities done
by the students whenever they sleep belatedly at night. In accordance to the ‘student’
title, it is normal for the students to study until late at night. They will stay up to settle
the dozens of assignments. Sometimes, they will sleep first and wake up at early in
the morning to do their works but sometimes, they will stay up until the early
morning. However, there are a number of students who did other activities rather than
study to fill up their time such as playing games, watching the movie, surfing the
Internet, reading the novels, loafing with friends and others. Students who did not get
sufficient sleep will experience the negative impacts of sleep deprivation.
f) Awareness of the bad impacts of sleep deprivation.
Figure 6.0
97%
3%
Awarenessof the bad impact of
sleep deprivation
Yes
No

14. 14
The data above also tabulated in a doughnut chart. It indicates that 97 percent out
of 32 respondents are aware of the bad impacts caused by sleep deprivation while the
remaining 3 percent are not aware of it.
This question was designed to identify how a sleep deprivation affects the
students during the daytime. Based on the data, most of the students are aware of the
negative effects of sleep deprivation. However, there are few numbers of students
who are not aware of it. Thus, awareness should be created among themselves in
order to avoid them from experiencing the negative impacts of sleep deprivation. The
organizations in universities and schools should play their roles in creating such
awareness among students by making a talk or campaign to instill this awareness
inside each of the students.
g) Sleepiness in the morning.
Figure 7.0
The data is analyzed in a pie chart. The pie chart shows that 88 percent of the
respondents claimed that they feel sleepy in the morning whenever they sleep late at
88%
12%
Sleepiness
Yes
No

15. 15
night. However, 12 percent of them admitted that they do not feel sleepy in the
morning even though they sleep late at night.
This question was made to answer the second objective which is to discover the
effects of sleep deprivation onto the students. Based on the data above, most of the
students agreed that they become sleepy in the morning when they sleep late at night.
To support, Tsui and Wing (2009) reported that about 35% of the students
complained of significant daytime sleepiness, which could potentially jeopardize their
attention and concentration. Therefore, the students are advised to sleep early at night
to avoid them from being sleepy in the class in the morning. If they are sleepy in the
class, they might not able to give a full concentration towards the lesson taught by the
lecturer. This might affect them in the declination of their academic performance.
h) The late-night sleep affects the performance during daytime.
Figure 8.0
Yes
84%
No
16%
Late-night sleep affects the
performance

16. 16
The data is also analyzed in a pie chart. Based on the chart above, it can be seen
crystal clear that the majority of the respondents agreed that the late-night sleep
affects their performances during the daytime with the percentage of 84 percent.
However, the remaining (16 percent) of them claimed that the late-night sleep does
not affect them at all.
This question was included to relate to the last objective which is to identify how
a sleep deprivation affects the students of CFS IIUM during the daytime. Based on
the data, the majority of students agreed that sleep deprivation affects their
performances during the daytime. Similarly, Seblewngel Lemma, Bizu Gelaye,
Yemane Berhane, Alemayehu Worku and Michelle A Williams (2012) stated that
perceived stress level and symptoms of depression and anxiety were strongly
associated with sleep quality. Therefore, the students should take a sufficient night
rest in order to ensure that they get a full energy to start their day when they wake up
in the morning. Since the late-night sleep affects their performance during the
daytime, the students should avoid themselves from sleeping late at night.

17. 17
5.0 CONCLUSION
In conclusion, it is strongly believed that the students in Centre for Foundation
Studies, International Islamic University Malaysia (CFS, IIUM) are actually aware of the
negative impacts of sleep deprivation. However, they are still tending to sleep late at
night because of the late-night activities which are more interesting rather than just
sleeping. Besides, they might be influenced by friends who sleep behind the schedule at
night. This makes them hard to sleep earlier since their friends are still awake. Therefore,
they will do a bundle of activities to fill up their times.
As implication, the sleep hygiene education should be implemented among
students as early as elementary school and throughout the college years. If the children
are taught about the importance of good sleep hygiene, these patterns of sleep could be
carried into their college years. This situation might help to prevent the continuation of
poor sleep habits in adulthood. “Insomnia has become recognized as a major contributing
factor to a variety of negative social downfalls” (Institute of Medicine, 2006).
In order to produce this research project, there are some shortcomings with regard
to the conducting of this research project. One of the limitations is the lack of previous
research. There is very limited amount of previous research on sleep deprivation.
Researcher has faced difficulties in finding the relevant literature review to be included in
this project. Besides that, the time constraint also limits this research as researcher does
not have enough time to gather information due to the lack of time. Researcher was only
given about ten days to collect all of the data needed in completing this project.