Temporal concentration of daily activity is associated with academic performance: evidence from large-scale learning management system dataset

Despite emerging evidence suggesting that chronotype should be considered as a multidimensional construct, research relating chronotype to academic performance has focused mainly on the phase of the circadian rhythm (morningness–eveningness spectrum). Here, we examine the temporal concentration of activity, which measures how narrowly behavioral events are distributed across a 24-hour cycle. Using circular statistics, we quantified temporal concentration with mean resultant length in 3.4 million login events from 13,894 university students.

We found a nonlinear association between temporal concentration and grade point average (GPA): students with moderate temporal concentration achieved the highest GPA. This relationship varied across morningness–eveningness groups—morning-oriented students benefited from greater concentration, whereas evening-oriented students showed a trend toward lower performance as concentration increased. Temporal concentration was also nonlinearly linked to social jetlag, which increased with more concentrated activity across morningness–eveningness preferences.

These findings suggest that the academic disadvantage often attributed to specific chronotypes does not stem from time preference itself, but from the interplay of morningness–eveningness, temporal concentration of activity, and schedules that are incompatible with individual biological timings. These results suggest that temporal concentration may provide a complementary dimension to complex human circadian phenotypes, with potential implications for educational design and equity. The authors would like to thank the Northeastern Illinois University Office of Institutional Research and Assessment and the Center for Teaching and Learning for their assistance in organizing the original data set.

We would also like to thank Dr. Smarr, who co-authored the first publication using these data and whose chronotype classification was used in the current study, for his continued collegial support. We are also grateful to all the students whose data were analyzed in this study.

The project was partially supported by the grant from the Ministry of Science and Higher Education (Poland) as a project under the program Excellence Initiative—Research University IDUB (2020–2026), decision no. BOB-622-256/2025 awarded to PB and no. BOB-IDUB-622-412/2025 awarded to PS.

The authors also gratefully acknowledge financial support for this project by the Fulbright Specialist in Biology Education Program, which is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and the Polish-American Fulbright Commission. This manuscript's contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the Fulbright Program, the Government of the United States, or the Polish-American Fulbright Commission.