Brain training

It’s said a healthy body equals a healthy mind, but where’s the evidence? Emily Yeomans explains why the Fit for Study programme will help to provide an answer – one way or the other...

The benefits of physical activity have long been recognised to extend beyond our health, with exercise releasing mood-enhancing endorphins and evidence linking being more active with higher levels of achievement in other areas of life. But how can we encourage young people, who have so many other demands on their time, to be more active? And does better physical fitness really lead to better grades?

These are questions that a new project, Fit to Study, hopes to answer. It is one of six programmes set up by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) and Wellcome Trust, all of which focus on neuroscientific research, the intention being to discover the most effective means of improving attainment among students – especially those from the least well-off backgrounds. In the case of Fit to Study, this will be done by testing the impact of a programme designed to increase levels of physical activity during a typical PE lesson.

Recent research in neuroscience has demonstrated that aerobic exercise has several beneficial effects on brain function, which suggests being fitter could lead to doing better academically. In adults, for example, regular exercise has been shown to improve the efficiency of brain networks that are important for learning – including the networks that help guide our attention. Physical exercise also increases blood flow in the hippocampus (a key region for memory formation and consolidation) and hippocampal volume is positively related to physical fitness in both children and adults.

However, while neuroscience provides some good theories as to why physical activity should affect learning, evidence of an improvement in academic performance is less secure. Yes, a number of studies examining the impact of exercise on school-age children have revealed positive effects on outcomes such as working memory and pupils’ ability to stay on-task. And recent research led by Lina Käll from the University of Gothenburg showed that doubling the amount of time spent doing physical education at Swedish schools led to primary pupils being twice as likely to meet national learning goals. But a systematic analysis of studies – carried out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US – which examined the effect of exercise on academic achievement, revealed findings were almost exactly split between no effect and positive effects. The differences seen between studies may be down to variation in the exercise undertaken, which shows the importance of an intervention drawing from what is known about the type of exercise likely to be most beneficial for brain function.

Previous studies looking at the benefits of exercise have sometimes relied on correlational evidence, which shows that those who are more active also have improved outcomes in other areas – better attainment, for example. However, this type of data, although useful, does not show the positive benefits are a result of the exercise; it may be that more physically active people are systematically different in lots of other ways too (for example also having a better diet) and it is actually these factors that are resulting in the perceived benefits.

The Fit to Study project has, however, been carefully designed to test the impact of the type of physical activity likely to be most beneficial for brain function – moderate to vigorous activity. It will recruit 70 schools that will be randomly allocated to either a treatment or control group. The treatment group will receive the physical activity intervention and the control group will continue with its normal PE lessons and receive other incentives for participating. By randomly selecting the schools that will get the intervention and those that will not, we hope to create two groups with an equal mix of characteristics that we can observe and those we cannot. This way, the only systematic difference will be whether or not the schools receive the Fit to Study intervention, and we will be able to unpick the impact of the exercise on attainment.

We anticipate getting the results of this project in January 2017 and they will be equally interesting whether we find a positive, neutral or negative impact. If we do find that greater aerobic exercise leads to improved attainments, then a clear programme will be ready and available for others to use. Positive results could also drive up the status of physical exercise in schools – which are under ever-greater pressures to improve exam results – making sure that exercise has a core place within the lives of all young people.

About the author

Emily Yeomans is grants manager at the Education Endowment Foundation educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk