14 DAY TRIAL // New research seems to show that children at school districts where the US “No Child Left Behind” Act has been implemented are very likely to not benefit from the appropriate amount of physical exercise youngsters at their age should. The ancient Latins had a proverb that roughly translates into “Healthy mind in a healthy body,” a reference to the fact that their young ones practiced a lot of sports at school, alongside studying conventional subjects such as mathematics and writing.
In US schools, the amount of sports practiced by children has diminished significantly since Bush's law has been implemented, a state of affairs that has left many of the nation's kids at risk of not being able to pay attention to other classes. Scientific studies show that physical exercises and gymnastics increase the attention span of the average child much more than any vitamin supplement ever could.
“The goal of the study was to see if a single acute bout of moderate exercise – walking – was beneficial for cognitive function in a period of time afterward. This question has been asked before by our lab and others, in young adults and older adults, but it's never been asked in children. That's why it's an important question,” University of Illinois professor of kinesiology and community health Charles Hillman, who is also the director of the Neurocognitive Kinesiology Laboratory, shares. He has been the leader of a new study that has demonstrated that physical activities can increase a child's performances on academic achievement tests.
“What we found is that following the acute bout of walking, children performed better on the flanker task. They had a higher rate of accuracy, especially when the task was more difficult. Along with that behavioral effect, we also found that there were changes in their event-related brain potentials (ERPs) – in these neuroelectric signals that are a covert measure of attentional resource allocation,” he adds.
Among the recommendations that experts make for those teachers who are interested in including physical activities in their curricula, Hillman mentions scheduling outdoor recesses for all the children, where the young ones can walk around for at least a few minutes per day, as well as integrating physical activities with learning.