Regular exercise can help boost pupils’ exam grades and develop cognitive skills, research says
- Scientists found regular exercise helps children to develop their brain skills
- ‘Executive function’ was assessed before and after several months of exercise
- Those who had poor cognitive skills to begin with benefited most from exercise
Regular physical exercise can help struggling pupils gain higher grades at school, research suggests.
Scientists found it helps children develop brain skills. Children’s ‘executive function’ – where they process information and think about two things at once – was assessed before and after several months of exercise, which included aerobics, ball games and playing tag.
Researchers found those who had poor cognitive skills to begin with benefited most from routine exercise.
Doing more exercise did not have any negative effects on children who had superior cognitive abilities.
Regular physical exercise can help struggling pupils gain higher grades at school, research suggests (Stock image)
The findings challenge the stereotype that smart children are not athletic.
Study co-author Dr Keita Kamijo, of Tsukuba University in Japan, said: ‘Daily physical activity is critical for school-aged children. We were able to see that physical activity helps children the most if they start out with poor executive function.’
Children’s executive function was assessed before and after several months of exercise, which included aerobics, ball games and playing tag.
Executive function measures three types of cognitive skills, including the ability to suppress impulses, to memorise information and process it and think about two things at once.
Children were asked to name the colour in which words like ‘red’ and ‘blue’ were displayed on a computer screen (‘red’ displayed in red font).
This is easy when they match but forces children to think again when they don’t – suppress a reflex response (‘red’ displayed in blue font).
Children were then asked to remember strings of letters of different lengths and classify shapes and colours, while changing the rules regularly.
Kids who had poor cognitive skills to begin with benefited most from routine exercise, the researchers found.
Doing more exercise did not have any negative effects on children who had superior cognitive abilities.
The findings challenge the school-age stereotype that smart kinds are not athletic.
Dr Kamijo said: ‘Because the cognitive functions evaluated in our study are related to academic performance.
‘We can say that daily physical activity is critical for school-aged children.
‘Our findings can help educational institutions design appropriate systems for maximizing the effects of physical activity and exercise.’
The findings were published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine.
They come as the number of British children leaving school without basic qualifications by the age of 18 has risen.
One in five fail to meet the benchmark of five good GCSEs or equivalent technical qualifications.
Exercise could help pupils struggling to wrap their heads around school because they lack the cognitive skills.
Children can leave school at the age of 16 in the UK, provided they complete an apprenticeship or traineeship until they’re 18.