Active commuting to school was inversely associated with academic achievement in primary but not secondary school students

Abstract

Active commuting to school was inversely associated with academic achievement in primary school students but not those at secondary school. Longitudinal and intervention studies are needed to further understand our findings.

Active Commute in Relation to Cognition and Academic Achievement in Children and Adolescents: A Systematic Review and Future Recommendations

“…All of the studies had approximately 50.00% girls as a part of their sample, with the lowest and the highest percentage being 42.47% [44] and 53.26% [42], respectively. Most of the studies (n = 10) were cross-sectional studies [42,[45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53], and two were prospective studies [43,44]. Eight studies accounted for socioeconomic status either by asking their socioeconomic status or by using parental education as a proxy for it.…”

“…All studies measured active commuting in the context of commuting to school; either to, from or both. Seven studies [43,45,[48][49][50][51][52] reported the percentage of their sample that engaged in active commuting, and it ranged from 12.00% to 70.41%.…”

“…Approximately half of the studies (seven) asked about engaging in active commuting only while going to the school [42,43,45,47,48,52,53], in which one of the studies doubled the duration reported, to account for the round trip [47]. The remaining five studies measured active commuting both to and from school [44,46,[49][50][51]. Out of 12 studies, only six studies tried to assess the dose of ACS, albeit only in terms of duration [43,45,47,50,52,53], whereas the other studies measured it as a binary variable.…”

“…Including the two studies, a total of eight studies tested the association between active commute and cognition [42,43,45,[47][48][49]52,53], and six studies [44,[46][47][48]50,51] examined the association between active commute and academic achievement. Cognitive outcomes included domains of intelligence [45,52], executive functioning [47,48], information processing speed [47], working memory [43], verbal fluency [53], attention [43], and visuospatial skill [42,49].…”

“…The measures used were either computerized objective tasks (e.g., Eriksen flanker task), or paper-and-pencil tasks scored by the researchers (e.g., cognitive maps). The studies measuring academic achievement covered domains of reading fluency and reading comprehension [44], arithmetic skills [44,[46][47][48]50,51], language scores (including English, Norwegian, and Spanish) [46,47,50,51], final subject grades [51], and grade point average [51]. Four studies used grades calculated by the school [46,47,50,51], one study used scores on a custom-made test [48], and one study used scores from a standardized achievement test battery [44].…”