Move it, move it: how physical activity at school helps the mind (as well as the body)

Brendon Hyndman, Charles Sturt University

Federal Sports Minister Bridget McKenzie recently unveiled plans to convince state education and sports ministers to ensure sport and physical education is compulsory in schools.

The physical benefits of getting kids moving have been well recognised to help prevent chronic disease and develop movement habits across their lifespan.

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Yet one of McKenzie’s key points, to push for mandatory physical education, was based on improving school results.

This statement is an important and positive shift in the education sector. Until recently, bodies and minds were often considered separate entities when it came to education.

Physical education has been perceived as only dealing with the “movement of the body” or the “non-thinking thing”. So historically, it has been pushed to the periphery. For example, physical education is yet to be an endorsed focus for the national senior secondary curriculum.

Yet over the past two decades, growing research has strongly recognised the inter-connections between body and mind.

How can movement help a student’s brain?

Brain processing takes up about 20% of our total metabolism through cognitive activities like memory, attention and concentration.

This cognition needs a strong flow of fuel (glucose, oxygen) and hormones to activate and enhance the brain’s capacity to perform, learn and get rid of waste.

So any prolonged sitting and inactivity can lead to negative cognitive consequences. For instance, inactivity in childhood has been linked to reduced working memory, attention and learning.

A student’s brain does not keep itself healthy independently. It is the connection with a healthy, moving body that can help improve brain performance.

Physical activity is also important in developing students’ brain structures (cells/neurons) and functioning at an early age.

The human brain is not fully developed until the third decade of life, so getting kids moving can be a powerful academic strategy.

What does the research tell us?

More studies are linking physical activity and improved cognitive function. One of the most globally recognised found primary school students’ level of cognitive function increased from just 20 minutes of walking. Students did better in an academic test and had improved attention.

Since this study, there have been many other US studies that have established links between physical activity and students’ academic performance, including from the north east (with more than 1800 students) and Texas (2.5 million students).

Several large scale reviews have also identified links between physical activity and students’ academic performance, for example, grades and test scores.

In Australia, a study of 757 primary school students across 29 primary schools found fitter children had higher NAPLAN scores. Students with specialist physical education teachers also had higher numeracy and literacy scores.

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There is also evidence of improved cognitive performance (attention, memory, concentration), self-esteem, mental health (reduced depression, anxiety, stress), enjoyment and lesson engagement from school students’ participation in physical activity.

What type of physical activity is best?

Researchers are still working out what types, conditions and length of physical activities can have the most effect.

For instance, going for a routine walk requires less decision-making and intensity than completing a Tough Mudder or Ninja Warrior course.

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Top 5 tips to provide high quality physical activity at school

1. Curriculum

Opportunities to take part in authentic (resembling real-world) games and sports, embedded with reflective and guided thinking opportunities. This can help students develop solutions to movement problems and understand sporting traditions, roles, teamwork and rules.

2. Classroom

Provide active breaks (short break of a few minutes) with simple and/or integrated physical activities like moving to music during prolonged, inactive lessons to improve academic engagement.

3. Recess

Access to a larger variety of mobile equipment can engage students in more creative exploration of physical activities.

Mobile equipment can encourage more variety and choice for students to design complex, evolving physical activities beyond fixed locations.

4. Before and after school

Partnering with national sporting organisations through programs such as Australia’s Sporting Schools.

Students can then pursue sports and physical activity beyond those facilitated at school and by the program.

5. Active transport

Set up a walking school bus or bicycle train to plan a safely structured walk or ride to school with one or more adults, depending on air quality, distances to school and busyness of streets.

Brendon Hyndman, Senior Lecturer and Course Director of Postgraduate Studies in Education, Charles Sturt University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Revisions have been made to the previously available Australian Curriculum to make the curriculum easier to manage, particularly for primary schools, to simplify the curriculum’s presentation and to strengthen the focus on literacy.

To achieve this the volume of content in learning areas has been reduced by deleting, clarifying and simplifying content descriptions, where appropriate, and moving references to examples to the content elaborations. This has improved clarity of content descriptions and has resulted in an overall reduction in the number of content descriptions in the curriculum.

Changes to information on the version 8.0 Australian Curriculum website support the move to a more streamlined presentation of the curriculum. In this version of the website:

Substantial reductions to the volume of supporting information for each learning area, general capability and cross-curriculum priority have been made by removing duplication and paring back background detail.

A consolidated F–10 overview section reduces repetition and provides clearer and more concise information about the whole F–10 Australian Curriculum, including:

• the relationship between learning areas, general capabilities and cross-curriculum priorities
• common structural parts of each learning area and their purpose
• the contribution of each learning area to a student’s learning in Foundation – Year 2, Years 3–6 and Years 7–10
• implications for teaching, assessing and reporting.
• consistent navigational headings have been applied to the presentation of each learning area.

To support teachers to identify the specific changes that may affect programs that have been developed with the previously available draft, ACARA has made available a Tracked changes document for Foundation – Year 10 Australian Curriculum (PDF 2.9 mb) on the Australian Curriculum website. To view the details for the changes to the Health and Physical Education Scope and Sequence: Foundation to Year 10, please see pages 182 – 190 of the Tracked changes document.

**Article sourced from Australian Curriculum Website at www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/home/whats-changed.

UNESCO today released their report “Quality Physical Education: Guidelines for policy makers”. This global report provides a robust, evidence based framework and guidelines for the development and delivery of quality physical education programs to all children and young people.

Given Australia is moving from development mode into implementation of the new national curriculum in HPE across the majority of states and territories it provides a timely reminder of what quality PE looks like and why it is an absolute necessity.

The visual.ly graphic below provides a fabulous summary of the key information from the report.

Happy reading!