The ManicaPost
Siba Guzha Body Focus
Hello gentle readers. I hope i find you all well. We all want the best for our children. We all want them to be fit and healthy and strive in their education and succeed in lives. Children who are physically fit absorb and retain new information more effectively than children who are out of shape, a new study finds, raising timely questions about the wisdom of slashing physical education programs at schools.
Parents and exercise scientists (who, not infrequently, are the same people) have known for a long time that physical activity helps young people to settle and pay attention in school or at home, with salutary effects on academic performance.
A representative study, presented in May at the American College of Sports Medicine, found that fourth- and fifth-grade students who ran around and otherwise exercised vigorously for at least 10 minutes before a math test scored higher than children who had sat quietly before the exam.
More generally, in a large-scale study of almost 12 000 Nebraska schoolchildren <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23465408> published in August in The Journal of Pediatrics, researchers compiled each child’s physical fitness, as measured by a timed run, body mass index and academic achievement in English and math, based on the state’s standardised test scores.
Better fitness proved to be linked to significantly higher achievement scores, while, interestingly, body size had almost no role. Students who were overweight but relatively fit had higher test scores than lighter, less-fit children.
To date, however, no study specifically had examined whether and in what ways physical fitness might affect how children learn. So researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recently stepped into that breach, recruiting a group of local 9- and 10-year-old boys and girls, testing their aerobic fitness on a treadmill, and then asking 24 of the most fit and 24 of the least fit to come into the exercise physiology lab and work on some difficult memorization tasks.
Learning is, of course, a complex process, involving not only the taking in and storing of new information in the form of memories, a process known as encoding, but also recalling that information later. Information that cannot be recalled has not really been learned. Earlier studies of children’s learning styles have shown that most learn more readily if they are tested on material while they are in the process of learning it.
In effect, if they are quizzed while memorising, they remember more easily. Straight memorisation, without intermittent reinforcement during the process, is tougher, although it is also how most children study.
In this case, the researchers opted to use both approaches to learning, by providing their young volunteers with iPads onto which several maps of imaginary lands had been loaded. The maps were demarcated into regions, each with a four-letter name. During one learning session, the children were shown these names in place for six seconds. The names then appeared on the map in their correct position six additional times while children stared at and tried to memorize them. In a separate learning session, region names appeared on a different map in their proper location, then moved to the margins of the map.
The children were asked to tap on a name and match it with the correct region, providing in-session testing as they memorised. A day later, all of the children returned to the lab and were asked to correctly label the various maps’ regions.
The results, published last week in PLoS One <http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0072666>, show that, over all, the children performed similarly when they were asked to recall names for the map when their memorisation was reinforced by testing.
But when the recall involved the more difficult type of learning — memorising without intermittent testing — the children who were in better aerobic condition significantly outperformed the less-fit group, remembering about 40 percent of the regions’ names accurately, compared with barely 20 percent accuracy for the out-of-shape kids.
Body Focus gym offers its facilities for all ages. Come in and have a chat with our qualified personnel and find out what’s best for your child. Start Early; Start Now with Body Focus Gym Executive.
Siba Guzha is a fitness trainer at Body Focus Gym Executive. 1st Floor Meikles Mutare. Contact him on : Cell: 0772 789 110: Tel 020 64712 ext 218 or send feedback to Email: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> Website:www.bodyfocusgym.com
