The Synergistic Benefits of Physical Activity on Education and Overall Well-being

Introduction

In an era defined by sedentary lifestyles and increasing academic demands, the importance of physical activity cannot be overstated. A growing body of evidence suggests a strong correlation between physical activity, cognitive functions, and academic performance. This article explores the multifaceted benefits of incorporating physical activity into education and daily routines, highlighting its positive impact on cognitive abilities, mental health, and overall well-being.

The Link Between Physical Activity and Academic Performance

Evidence suggests that increasing physical activity and physical fitness may improve academic performance and that time in the school day dedicated to recess, physical education class, and physical activity in the classroom may also facilitate academic performance. Available evidence suggests that mathematics and reading are the academic topics that are most influenced by physical activity. These topics depend on efficient and effective executive function, which has been linked to physical activity and physical fitness.

Cognitive Functions and Brain Health

Executive function and brain health underlie academic performance. Basic cognitive functions related to attention and memory facilitate learning, and these functions are enhanced by physical activity and higher aerobic fitness. Single sessions of and long-term participation in physical activity improve cognitive performance and brain health. Children who participate in vigorous- or moderate-intensity physical activity benefit the most.

Time on Task

Given the importance of time on task to learning, students should be provided with frequent physical activity breaks that are developmentally appropriate. Although presently understudied, physically active lessons offered in the classroom may increase time on task and attention to task in the classroom setting.

Health as a Vital Moderating Factor

Although academic performance stems from a complex interaction between intellect and contextual variables, health is a vital moderating factor in a child's ability to learn. The idea that healthy children learn better is empirically supported and well accepted, and multiple studies have confirmed that health benefits are associated with physical activity, including cardiovascular and muscular fitness, bone health, psychosocial outcomes, and cognitive and brain health. The relationship of physical activity and physical fitness to cognitive and brain health and to academic performance is the subject of this chapter.

Brain Health Across the Lifespan

Given that the brain is responsible for both mental processes and physical actions of the human body, brain health is important across the life span. In adults, brain health, representing absence of disease and optimal structure and function, is measured in terms of quality of life and effective functioning in activities of daily living. In children, brain health can be measured in terms of successful development of attention, on-task behavior, memory, and academic performance in an educational setting. This chapter reviews the findings of recent research regarding the contribution of engagement in physical activity and the attainment of a health-enhancing level of physical fitness to cognitive and brain health in children. Correlational research examining the relationship among academic performance, physical fitness, and physical activity also is described. Because research in older adults has served as a model for understanding the effects of physical activity and fitness on the developing brain during childhood, the adult research is briefly discussed. The short- and long-term cognitive benefits of both a single session of and regular participation in physical activity are summarized.

Factors Influencing Academic Performance

Before outlining the health benefits of physical activity and fitness, it is important to note that many factors influence academic performance. Among these are socioeconomic status, parental involvement, and a host of other demographic factors. A valuable predictor of student academic performance is a parent having clear expectations for the child's academic success. Attendance is another factor confirmed as having a significant impact on academic performance. Because children must be present to learn the desired content, attendance should be measured in considering factors related to academic performance.

Physical Fitness and Physical Activity: Relation to Academic Performance

State-mandated academic achievement testing has had the unintended consequence of reducing opportunities for children to be physically active during the school day and beyond. In addition to a general shifting of time in school away from physical education to allow for more time on academic subjects, some children are withheld from physical education classes or recess to participate in remedial or enriched learning experiences designed to increase academic performance. Yet little evidence supports the notion that more time allocated to subject matter will translate into better test scores. Indeed, 11 of 14 correlational studies of physical activity during the school day demonstrate a positive relationship to academic performance. Overall, a rapidly growing body of work suggests that time spent engaged in physical activity is related not only to a healthier body but also to a healthier mind.

Cognitive Performance

Children respond faster and with greater accuracy to a variety of cognitive tasks after participating in a session of physical activity. A single bout of moderate-intensity physical activity has been found to increase neural and behavioral concomitants associated with the allocation of attention to a specific cognitive task. And when children who participated in 30 minutes of aerobic physical activity were compared with children who watched television for the same amount of time, the former children cognitively outperformed the latter. Visual task switching data among 69 overweight and inactive children did not show differences between cognitive performance after treadmill walking and sitting.

Post-Engagement Effects

When physical activity is used as a break from academic learning time, postengagement effects include better attention, increased on-task behaviors, and improved academic performance. Comparisons between 1st-grade students housed in a classroom with stand-sit desks where the child could stand at his/her discretion and in classrooms containing traditional furniture showed that the former children were highly likely to stand, thus expending significantly more energy than those who were seated. More important, teachers can offer physical activity breaks as part of a supplemental curriculum or simply as a way to reset student attention during a lesson and when provided with minimal training can efficaciously produce vigorous or moderate energy expenditure in students. Further, after-school physical activity programs have demonstrated the ability to improve cardiovascular endurance, and this increase in aerobic fitness has been shown to mediate improvements in academic performance, as well as the allocation of neural resources underlying performance on a working memory task.

Read also: Understanding PE Content

Reviews and Meta-Analyses

Over the past three decades, several reviews and meta-analyses have described the relationship among physical fitness, physical activity, and cognition (broadly defined as all mental processes). The majority of these reviews have focused on the relationship between academic performance and physical fitness-a physiological trait commonly defined in terms of cardiorespiratory capacity (e.g., maximal oxygen consumption; see Chapter 3). More recently, reviews have attempted to describe the effects of an acute or single bout of physical activity, as a behavior, on academic performance. These reviews have focused on brain health in older adults, as well as the effects of acute physical activity on cognition in adults. Some have considered age as part of the analysis. Reviews focusing on research conducted in children have examined the relationship among physical activity, participation in sports, and academic performance; physical activity and mental and cognitive health; and physical activity, nutrition, and academic performance. The findings of most of these reviews align with the conclusions presented in a meta-analytic review conducted by Fedewa and Ahn (2011). The studies reviewed by Fedewa and Ahn include experimental/quasi-experimental as well as cross-sectional and correlational designs, with the experimental designs yielding the highest effect sizes. The strongest relationships were found between aerobic fitness and achievement in mathematics, followed by IQ and reading performance. The range of cognitive performance measures, participant characteristics, and types of research design all mediated the relationship among physical activity, fitness, and academic performance. With regard to physical activity interventions, which were carried out both within and beyond the school day, those involving small groups of peers (around 10 youth of a similar age) were associated with the greatest gains in academic performance.

Global Presence

The number of peer-reviewed publications on this topic is growing exponentially. Further evidence of the growth of this line of inquiry is its increased global presence. Positive relationships among physical activity, physical fitness, and academic performance have been found among students from the Netherlands and Taiwan. Broadly speaking, however, many of these studies show small to moderate effects and suffer from poor research designs.

Children's Health and Health Disparities

Basch (2010) conducted a comprehensive review of how children's health and health disparities influence academic performance and learning. The author's report draws on empirical evidence suggesting that education reform will be ineffective unless children's health is made a priority. Basch concludes that schools may be the only place where health inequities can be addressed and that, if children's basic health needs are not met, they will struggle to learn regardless of the effectiveness of the instructional materials used. More recently, Efrat (2011) conducted a review of physical activity, fitness, and academic performance to examine the achievement gap. He discovered that only seven studies had included socioeconomic status as a variable, despite its known relationship to education.

Physical Fitness as a Learning Outcome of Physical Education

Achieving and maintaining a healthy level of aerobic fitness, as defined using criterion-referenced standards from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES; Welk et al., 2011), is a desired learning outcome of physical education programming. Regular participation in physical activity also is a national learning standard for physical education, a standard intended to facilitate the establishment of habitual and meaningful engagement in physical activity. Yet although physical fitness and participation in physical activity are established as learning outcomes in all 50 states, there is little evidence to suggest that children actually achieve and maintain these standards.

Access to Student-Level Data

Statewide and national datasets containing data on youth physical fitness and academic performance have increased access to student-level data on this subject. Early research in South Australia focused on quantifying the benefits of physical activity and physical education during the school day; the benefits noted included increased physical fitness, decreased body fat, and reduced risk for cardiovascular disease. Even today, Dwyer and colleagues are among the few scholars who regularly include in their research measures of physical activity intensity in the school environment, which is believed to be a key reason why they are able to report differentiated effects of different intensities. A longitudinal study in Trois-Rivières, Québec, Canada, tracked how the academic performance of children from grades 1 through 6 was related to student health, motor skills, and time spent in physical education. The researchers concluded that additional time dedicated to physical education did not inhibit academic performance.

Read also: The Importance of Seeding

Longitudinal Follow-Up

Longitudinal follow-up investigating the long-term benefits of enhanced physical education experiences is encouraging but largely inconclusive. In a study examining the effects of daily physical education during elementary school on physical activity during adulthood, 720 men and women completed the Québec Health Survey. Findings suggest that physical education was associated with physical activity in later life for females but not males; most of the associations were significant but weak. Adult body mass index (BMI) at age 34 was related to childhood BMI at ages 10-12 in females but not males. Longitudinal studies such as those conducted in Sweden and Finland also suggest that physical education experiences may be related to adult engagement in physical activity. From an academic performance perspective, longitudinal data on men who enlisted for military service imply that cardiovascular fitness at age 18 predicted cognitive performance in later life, thereby supporting the idea of offering physical education and physical activity opportunities well into emerging adulthood through secondary and postsecondary education.

Fitnessgram Components

Castelli and colleagues (2007) investigated younger children (in 3rd and 5th grades) and the differential contributions of the various subcomponents of the Fitnessgram®. Specifically, they examined the individual contributions of aerobic capacity, muscle strength, muscle flexibility, and body composition to performance in mathematics and reading on the Illinois Standardized Achievement Test among a sample of 259 children. Their findings corroborate those of the California Department of Education (Grissom, 2005), indicating a general relationship between fitness and achievement test performance. When the individual components of the Fitnessgram were decomposed, the researchers determined that only aerobic capacity was related to test performance. Muscle strength and flexibility showed no relationship, while an inverse association of BMI with test performance was observed, such that higher BMI was associated with lower.

Practical Ways to Incorporate Physical Activity into the Classroom

It is not enough to rely on the occasional gym class or recess. In many schools, gym happens only a few times a week, or in some cases, just once a week. And even then, research shows that much of gym class is spent waiting in line, listening to instructions or doing activities that are not truly active (National Public Radio). Add that to the long hours spent sitting in classrooms, and it is clear that students need more opportunities to move.

Ideally, movement and physical activity would be built into the core curriculum alongside reading and math - not as an add-on, but as an essential tool for learning. To harness the power of physical activity as a learning tool, it is best to make it a part of your daily classroom rhythm. Here are some fun and simple ways to consistently incorporate physical activity into your classroom routines:

Stretching or yoga poses during the first five minutes of settling in after morning announcements
Quick rounds of jumping jacks or high knees before transitioning to a new lesson
Balance exercises or movement challenges after silent reading
A short, fun movement game, such as “Simon Says,” after a long independent work session

For even more inspiration, here is a list of 21 classroom-friendly movement activities. Each activity is designed to be inclusive for varying fitness levels, so all students feel safe and comfortable participating. Best of all, these activities are fun, helping students to see physical activity not as a chore, but as an enjoyable and rewarding part of their day.

Additional Benefits of Physical Activity

Boost in Academic Performance

Physical activity can improve concentration, problem-solving, memory, and school attendance, which correlates with better grades and test scores in school.

Maintaining a Healthy Body

Physical activity builds strong muscles, bones, and joints. It also improves cardiovascular health, which positively impacts blood pressure and blood sugar levels.

Mental Health

Physical activity releases endorphins, the brain’s feel-good chemicals while reducing the stress hormones, such as cortisol.

Social Development

Physical activity can further interpersonal connections through sports, group activities, and teamwork.

Self-Esteem

Physical activity provides room for achievement and athletic improvement, building self-esteem, belonging, and confidence.

Examples of Activities

Adding physical activity into the mix of education and day-to-day classroom activities has the benefits listed above and more. Not sure where to start as an educator?

Ball tossing: With this activity, students can sit or stand in a circle while they take turns asking and answering questions, spelling, or learning new words.
Creative workstations or scavenger hunts: A simple yet interactive way to get students out of their seats. Hand out activity sheets and set up information-based workstations that lead them to each area around the class or school to find the answer.
Answer relays: While quizzing groups of students on previously learned information, break them into groups to see who can race the fastest to the front of the class and write the answer. Or have them write the answer on paper or a small whiteboard before they pass the item with the written answer up to the front of the class in a row.
Trashcan basketball or soccer: This is a great activity for healthy competition! Students can be broken up into singles, pairs, or larger teams while they answer fact-based questions to score points. Whether you try this out with a basketball hoop or just a trash can and a crumbled-up piece of construction paper-students are bound to have fun while moving their bodies.
Mindful exercises: In between lessons or at the end of a school day, promote stretch breaks.

Resources for Educators

B3: Brain, Body, Behavior: a multimedia curriculum that helps students in Grades K-6 spark their brains, build their bodies, and improve their behavior to increase academic performance.
HealthSmart Supercharging Lesson Cards: These colorful and laminated cards are ideal for getting students active throughout a lesson, promoting critical thinking, moving their bodies, and encouraging them to work collaboratively with their classmates.
Floor Graphics: Encourage the excitement of learning through play with our colorful sensory floor graphics. Great for problem-solving, creativity, balance, coordination, and motor skills.

The Importance of Physical Education

While some may consider gym class a second-rate period for kids to blow off steam and fill some time in the school day, the benefits are quite intriguing. From improving health on a physical and emotional level to promoting social skills, this class needs more notoriety. Physical activity can have a significant impact on people of all ages, but it is particularly important for school-aged children. As children grow and learn, this is one facet of their development that should not be overlooked. It is well-documented knowledge that exercising for at least 30 minutes daily is a great way to stay physically healthy. Physical health can delay the onset of disease and statistically increase lifespans.

Daily Physical Education

With this class built into their school day, students do not have to be involved in extracurricular activities or get a gym membership to achieve this recommended daily level of exercise. It is clear that physical health contributes to living longer, but it can also be a cause for improving the quality of life. Physical activity is vital for promoting long-term health. It can also have positive effects on mental health as well. It is no secret that many teenagers go through phases where they struggle with self-body image issues. Regular exercise achieved in physical education classes can combat this issue. Exercise also has other benefits to promote mental health, such as reduced stress, improved mood, better self-esteem, and increased mental alertness. In an era when students are struggling with mental health at an alarming rate, physical education classes can certainly help combat this major issue.

Social and Leadership Skills

There are certainly some characteristics that young people can build upon by staying active, which is another benefit of physical education in schools. Many athletes can have the opportunity to develop their leadership skills by being active and on a team. Being a part of a team is something that almost everyone will someday have to experience. They can develop their social skills with classmates, and they will likely boost their academic performance also. Being physically active and working toward goals or benchmarks, particularly on a team, can create confidence as well.

Adaptation in Schools

The pandemic has revolutionized the way we do things in schools. While the 2020-2021 school year was an incredible challenge, educators are slowly figuring out how to adapt. At the start, physical education classes were not the same. Locker rooms were shut down, so wearing P.E. uniforms was no longer the norm. Slowly, things started to change. When sports and extracurricular activities were getting back to normal, this allowed for gym class to follow suit. While classes were adapted and nearly on a sabbatical last school year, things are tracking closer to normal this year. Some schools still require masks to be worn indoors, but wearing P.E. uniforms, accessing lockers, and playing on and with equipment are no longer barriers in many schools. For a long while, communities were stripped of things that were a large part of our lives. Both kids and adults were highly disappointed when school sports and activities were temporarily halted. Not only do kids get enjoyment from activities, parents and community members also enjoy watching these activities. Physical education classes can instill a certain degree of interest in students who will carry this with them their entire lives. Often, that interest promotes physical activity through lifelong activities that are taught in daily P.E.

Additional Resources

Comprehensive School Physical Activity Program (CSPAP): Provides details about its suggested Physical Education and Physical Activity Framework.
Comprehensive School Physical Activity Programs for schools and school districts: This physical activity program guide can help you develop new programs, evaluate programs, or improve existing programs.
Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans: Provides guidelines for physical activity for different age groups.
Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child: A Collaborative Approach to Learning and Health.

tags: #physical #activity #and #education #benefits