Two students, Emma and Ben, discussing their psychology project on

Section 3. You will hear two students, Emma and Ben, discussing their psychology project on sleep and study with their tutor. First, you have some time to look at questions 21 to 24. Now listen carefully and answer questions 21 to 24. TUTOR: Emma, Ben, your sleep-and-study project. Remind me how you came to choose it. BEN: It really started with me. I'd slept terribly all through the exam period, and I noticed my marks slipping at exactly the same time, so I got curious about whether there was a genuine link, or whether I was imagining it. EMMA: We had thought about doing something on diet instead, and to be fair our tutor suggested a couple of other topics too, but Ben's own experience made sleep feel far more real to us than any of those. TUTOR: A good personal starting point. And your method? EMMA: We asked forty students to keep a sleep diary every night for three weeks. We'd have loved to give everyone one of those wearable trackers, but they were wildly beyond our budget, and one-to-one interviews would have eaten up the whole term, so the diaries were the practical choice. BEN: The tricky bit was getting people to fill them in every single day, but on the whole they worked well. TUTOR: Now, you looked at several different factors. Talk me through what you found for each. Start with the total number of hours slept. BEN: That was our first surprise. We'd assumed the sheer number of hours would be everything, but it mattered far less than we expected, the students who slept longest were not necessarily the ones doing best. Before you hear the rest of the discussion, you have some time to look at questions 25 to 30. TUTOR: Interesting. And bedtime? EMMA: That was the headline. A regular bedtime showed the strongest link with good marks of anything we measured, students who went to bed at roughly the same time every night did best, even when they didn't sleep especially long. TUTOR: What about caffeine? I'd have guessed that was crucial. BEN: So did we, and so does everyone. But in our data, caffeine made almost no measurable difference either way, which genuinely shocked us. TUTOR: And screen use late at night? EMMA: That one did matter, students who were on their phones into the small hours tended to do worse, though the effect wasn't as strong as bedtime. TUTOR: A clear picture. Any limitations you'd flag honestly? EMMA: Two. Forty students is a small sample, so we'd be cautious about generalising to everyone. And three weeks is a short window, a whole term might well show a different pattern. BEN: But a couple of things weren't problems, whatever the critics say, we did keep a proper control group, and we deliberately stuck to one subject area to keep it clean. TUTOR: Sensible reservations. And your recommendation? BEN: Not shifting lectures to later in the day, as some students demand. Instead, the university should actually teach students about good sleep habits, ideally in the very first week. EMMA: Education, in other words, rather than fiddling with the timetable. TUTOR: Well argued. Well done, both of you. That is the end of Section 3. You now have some time to check your answers.