Findings suggest physical education, recess may improve academic success
WebMD News from HealthDay
By Tara Haelle
HealthDay Reporter
MONDAY, Sept. 29, 2014 (HealthDay News) -- Regular daily exercise appears to improve children's attention and multi-tasking skills, according to a new study.
Elementary school-age students who participated in an after-school program with plenty of physical activity showed greater improvements in several areas of so-called "executive function" than similar students who did not participate.
Executive function refers to a range of mental or "cognitive" skills that include memory, focus, attention and the ability to switch back and forth between tasks.
Lead researcher Charles Hillman said that students who had the highest attendance in the program saw the biggest gains in mental skills.
"I think these are the hardest evidence we have available that time spent in physical activities, which would include physical education and recess, not only doesn't detract from academic goals, but it might enhance academic performance," said Hillman, a professor of kinesiology and community health at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The findings were published online Sept. 29 and in the October print issue of the journal Pediatrics.
The researchers randomly assigned 221 children, aged 7 to 9, to either the after-school program or a wait-list for the program. The after-school program occurred for nearly all of the school year (150 days). Over two hours, physical activity alternated with rest periods, resulting in about 70 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise every weekday, Hillman said.
The children took tests to measure their "inhibition" and their "cognitive flexibility," which is basically their ability to switch between different tasks successfully, such as reading something and then answering questions about that reading, Hillman said.
Inhibition involves two types of thinking skills, Hillman explained: the ability to ignore distractions in the environment to focus on something specific, and the ability to stop a well-learned response quickly when necessary.
If a child automatically starts to ride his bicycle across a street when a light turns green, for example, a strong inhibition response refers to how quickly he can prevent himself from going forward when he notices a car running the red light.
Although children in both the after-school program and the wait-list group experienced improvements in physical fitness, inhibition and cognitive flexibility, the after-school program participants made bigger gains in all three areas.
The program participants also showed improvements in attention that were not seen in the wait-list group, and they had smaller gains in body mass index (BMI) than the wait-list students. BMI is a measurement of body fat based on height and weight.
Because the study directly compared two similar groups of children, the findings support the idea that the physical activity actually caused the brain improvements, though it's less clear how physical activity improves thinking skills, the experts said.
source : After-School Exercise Yields Brain Gains: Study
