Sports Promote Writing Tests Successfully

Promoting physical activity among students can improve their academic performance.

A new study on physical and intellectual education of children was conducted in Italy. The scientists observed the performance indicators of adolescents aged 8 to 11 years in response to the complaints from their teachers about the reduction of the students’ attentiveness and concentration. The children were asked to pass three exams (the tests only took three weeks), lasting for 50 minutes each. Before the first exam, each student had been engaged in some form of exercise. Before the second test, the children simply attended regular classes at school. And before the third one, they were offered both physical and mental activity.

The most effective “key to high performance” were sports exercises performed immediately before the exam. On the contrary, the combination of exercise and studying worsened the results: the speed of processing information during the exam decreased as well as the students’ overall results. The authors of the study attribute this fact to the increasing tension of combining physical and mental activity before performing more complex tasks, such as the exam.