For Better Grades, Try Gym Class

Interesting studies:

If you want a young person to focus intently in school and perform well on tests, should you first send him or her to gym class? That question, which has particular relevance for school districts weighing whether to reduce or ax their physical education programs to save money, motivated a number of stimulating new examinations into the interplay of activity and attention. Some of the experiments studied children; others looked at laboratory rats bred to have an animal version of attention deficit disorder. For both groups, exercise significantly affected their ability to concentrate, although some activities seemed to be better than others at sharpening attention.

…Still, she continued, the current findings are encouraging. "The implication is that exercise might in fact help to treat" young people with A.D.H.D. and, more broadly, enable all children to better absorb lessons in geometry or geology. "If I had to extrapolate" to children from her group's findings in rats, Ms. Robinson said, the lesson would be, "let kids run around" during the school day and don't require them constantly either to sit or to think. Or, to be more blunt, it may be time to start looking at gym classes not as lost academic hours but as a means to scholastic enrichment.

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August 10, 2011, 12:01 am

For Better Grades, Try Gym Class

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/10/how-gym-class-can-help-students-excel