Physical activity and academic performance in high school students

Abstract

There are still doubts about the real benefits of physical activity on the academic performance of adolescents. The aim of this study was to determine whether the physical activity (PA) interferes in the academic performance of high school students. The study included 348 adolescents from one federal public school. For information regarding PA, the International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ short-version) was used. For PAL classification the adolecents who had 300 minutes/week or more of physical activity were considered as active. The information related to the participation in sports schools was obtained through a question inserted in IPAQ. For the academic performance, the average grades of the first semester of 2015 were used, within the three major Knowledge Areas, as defined by the National Curriculum Standards. There was no significant correlation between academic performance and PA (r= 0.06; p= 0.28). Higher minimum scores were found among active high school students and higher average school for areas 1 -Languages, Codes and its Technologies (7.2±0.8) and 2 -Natural Sciences, Mathematics and its Technologies (6.6±1.3) among participants in sports schools, with statistical significance (p= 0.017; p= 0.014). In conclusion, PAL did not relate to the academic performance of pupils in this study and participants of sports schools achieved better academic performance demonstrating that sports activities can cause beneficial effects in their cognitive performances. Keywords

Barriers to Physical Activity among Full-Time Students: A Case Study during the COVID-19 Pandemic

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Educação física no ensino médio: um direito ameaçado

“…A pesquisa de Datar e Sturm ( 2004) ao investigar a relação entre o tempo de prática da Educação Física e o Índice de massa corporal (IMC) no ensino fundamental conclui que a expansão das aulas de Educação Física pode contribuir no combate à obesidade, principalmente entre as meninas. A pesquisa de Esteban-Cornejo et al (2015), apontou que a participação de três ou mais aulas de educação física durante a semana estavam relacionadas com um melhor desempenho escolar, tese corroborada pelos estudos de Singh et al (2012), Mota et al (2015 e Pandolfo et al (2017), que encontraram indícios de que a prática de exercícios físicos e esportes estão relacionadas a um bom desempenho escolar e também à melhoria da capacidade cognitiva de jovens.…”

Effects of indoor hockey intervention on motor proficiency and physical fitness in adolescents

“…Having physical activity through sports activities can improve the fitness and motor skills of students. Students tend to do physical activities to choose activities that are popular among them (Pandolfo et al, 2018). Adolescent participation in physical activity may increase as a result of external stimuli or outside motivation (Butt et al, 2011;Zhu & Chen, 2013).…”