What Science Says About Learning and Sport
There is no denying that a solid education for children, adolescents and pretty much everyone in essential. To have a successful future you need to learn about something, whatever it is that interests and excites you. The learning comes from a host of sources, methods and strategies; school, university, apprenticeships, on the job etc.
Source: YLM Sport Science. Santana et al, 2017.
However, school as a form of learning is getting out of control. In a post-COVID world, schools are scrambling to get as much information to the learners as possible. Some schools now start before 8:30 and finish after 16:30. Practically a 9-5 jobs worth of education per day 5 days a week. It’s ridiculous to ask kids to focus and sit for that long each day, we definitely couldn’t do that, yet kids and young adults are expected to.
Schools seem to have adopted a 'more is better' approach to learning. This is simply an ineffective and inefficient way to get kids to learn in the long term and get them to hate school, and learning, along the way, plus is boring! Overloading them with information, mountains of homework and pressuring the learners to do well in tests is not long-term learning, and it certainly isn’t quality teaching.
This is increasing sports dropout, raising stress and anxiety levels and decreasing the overall health, physical and mental, of the younger population. Here’s the thing, physical activity and sport are actually incredibly beneficial for academic success, especially sports requiring high oxidative capacity (aerobic fitness) such as swimming, running, rowing etc. So, the usual dance of teachers recommending learners quit their sporting activities to ‘focus on their academic studies’ is flat out idiotic. Sport complements classroom performance.
The current methods of education used by teachers and the school system are inefficient and appears a quantity over quality approach. High volumes of classroom work, homework and long days do not equate to a healthy, productive and high-performance learning environment.
Instead… we propose a new approach to learning….
Quizzing: Tests are a great educational tool, but they are a poor method of assessment. Low stakes quizzes (no negative consequences) allows the learner and teacher to assess the gaps in the learner’s knowledge and therefore what to focus their efforts on.
Spaced Practice: The blocked practice of the same material over and over may give us the impression that we are learning, but in reality we are rubbish are accurately assessing our own performances, often overestimating. Spacing out your materials by adding some time between bouts of learning allows you to forget pieces of information. This sounds completely contradictory, how does forgetting help with learning. Well, allowing some time to pass between bouts of learning forces use to retrieve information from our brains, each time we do this we strengthen those synapses (connections in the brain) and make them more robust and long term.
Interleaving: Rather than hammer one topic before moving on, spend 5-10 minutes on one subject then move on to another that is related or even completely different. This switches off the ‘auto-pilot’ in your mind and keeps you focused and learning. Breaking up subjects or topics within each subject is a much better way to learn in the long term. It’s frustrating, you may feel you aren’t learning anything, but that’s what learning such be. Think of it like writing in the sand compared to writing in stone. Real easy to write in the sand, but it’s gone the next day, the message in the stone is there 1,000 years later.
Further reading:
Santana, C. C. A., Azevedo, L. B., Cattuzzo, M. T., Hill, J. O., Andrade, L. P., & Prado, W. L. (2017). Physical fitness and academic performance in youth: A systematic review. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, 27(6), 579-603.