"The goal of the study was to see if a single acute bout of moderate exercise - walking - was beneficial for cognitive function in a period of time afterward," said lead researcher Charles Hillman, director of the Neurocognitive Kinesiology Laboratory at Illinois.
Results of the study suggest that physical activity may increase students' cognitive control - or ability to pay attention - and also result in better performance on academic achievement tests.
From the articles: As school districts across the nation revamped curricula to meet requirements of the federal "No Child Left Behind" Act, opportunities for children to be physically active during the school day diminished significantly.
Future mandates, however, might be better served by taking into account findings from a University of Illinois study suggesting the academic benefits of physical education classes, recess periods and after-school exercise programs. The research, led by Charles Hillman, a professor of kinesiology and community health and the director of the Neurocognitive Kinesiology Laboratory at Illinois, suggests that physical activity may increase students' cognitive control - or ability to pay attention - and also result in better performance on academic achievement tests. "The goal of the study was to see if a single acute bout of moderate exercise - walking - was beneficial for cognitive function in a period of time afterward," Hillman said. "This question has been asked before by our lab and others, in young adults and older adults, but it's never been asked in children. That's why it's an important question."
For each of three testing criteria, researchers noted a positive outcome linking physical activity, attention and academic achievement.
Study participants were 9-year-olds (eight girls, 12 boys) who performed a series of stimulus-discrimination tests known as flanker tasks, to assess their inhibitory control.
On one day, students were tested following a 20-minute resting period; on another day, after a 20-minute session walking on a treadmill. Students were shown congruent and incongruent stimuli on a screen and asked to push a button to respond to incongruencies. During the testing, students were outfitted with an electrode cap to measure electroencephalographic (EEG) activity.
"What we found is that following the acute bout of walking, children performed better on the flanker task," Hillman said. "They had a higher rate of accuracy, especially when the task was more difficult. Along with that behavioral effect, we also found that there were changes in their event-related brain potentials (ERPs) - in these neuroelectric signals that are a covert measure of attentional resource allocation."
One aspect of the neuroelectric activity of particular interest to researchers is a measure referred to as the P3 potential. Hillman said the amplitude of the potential relates to the allocation of attentional resources.
"What we found in this particular study is, following acute bouts of walking, children had a larger P3 amplitude, suggesting that they are better able to allocate attentional resources, and this effect is greater in the more difficult conditions of the flanker test, suggesting that when the environment is more noisy - visual noise in this case - kids are better able to gate out that noise and selectively attend to the correct stimulus and act upon it."
In an effort to see how performance on such tests relates to actual classroom learning, researchers next administered an academic achievement test. The test measured performance in three areas: reading, spelling and math.
Again, the researchers noted better test results following exercise.
"And when we assessed it, the effect was largest in reading comprehension," Hillman said. In fact, he said, "If you go by the guidelines set forth by the Wide Range Achievement Test, the increase in reading comprehension following exercise equated to approximately a full grade level.
"Thus, the exercise effect on achievement is not statistically significant, but a meaningful difference."
Hillman said he's not sure why the students' performance on the spelling and math portions of the test didn't show as much of an improvement as did reading comprehension, but suspects it may be related to design of the experiment. Students were tested on reading comprehension first, leading him to speculate that too much time may have elapsed between the physical activity and the testing period for those subjects.
"Future attempts will definitely look at the timing," he said. Subsequent testing also will introduce other forms of physical-activity testing.
"Treadmills are great," Hillman said. "But kids don't walk on treadmills, so it's not an externally valid form of exercise for most children. We currently have an ongoing project that is looking at treadmill walking at the same intensity relative to a Wii Fit game - which is a way in which kids really do exercise."
Still, given the preliminary study's positive outcomes on the flanker task, ERP data and academic testing, study co-author Darla Castelli believes these early findings could be used to inform useful curricular changes.
"Modifications are very easy to integrate," Castelli said. For example, she recommends that schools make outside playground facilities accessible before and after school.
"If this is not feasible because of safety issues, then a school-wide assembly containing a brief bout of physical activity is a possible way to begin each day," she said. "Some schools are using the Intranet or internal TV channels to broadcast physical activity sessions that can be completed in each classroom."
Among Castelli's other recommendations for school personnel interested in integrating physical activity into the curriculum:
* scheduling outdoor recess as a part of each school day;
* offering formal physical education 150 minutes per week at the elementary level, 225 minutes at the secondary level;
* encouraging classroom teachers to integrate physical activity into learning.
An example of how physical movement could be introduced into an actual lesson would be "when reading poetry (about nature or the change of seasons), students could act like falling leaves," she said.
The U. of I. study appears in the current issue of the journal Neuroscience. Along with Castelli and Hillman, co-authors are U. of I. psychology professor Art Kramer and kinesiology and community health graduate student Mathew Pontifex and undergraduate Lauren Raine.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Most Shared: Exercise Makes Kids Learn, Focus Better
Most Shared: Teachers Failing at Sex-Ed
A study of sex education in Illinois public schools found that only 42 percent of sex education teachers passed the comprehensiveness test. The four basic topics required to be rated "comprehensive:" abstinence until marriage or older, HIV/AIDS, other sexually transmitted diseases, and contraception.
"For this study, we set the bar for comprehensiveness fairly low relative to what most medical and public health organizations recommend," said senior author Stacy Tessler Lindau, MD, "and one out of three programs failed to clear it."
Nearly two-thirds of 12th graders have engaged in sexual intercourse, and studies suggest that accurate knowledge can delay sexual debut and increase the use of condoms or other forms of contraception when adolescents do become sexually active.
From the article: A study of sex education in Illinois public schools found that one out of three teachers did not meet a very forgiving definition of comprehensive instruction, researchers from the University of Chicago Medical Center report in the February 2008 issue of the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology.
Only 65 percent of teachers who responded to the survey covered the four basic topics required to be rated "comprehensive:" abstinence until marriage or older, HIV/AIDS, other sexually transmitted diseases, and contraception. When the researchers added a widely recommended fifth topic--where to get condoms, birth control and health related services--only 42 percent of sex education teachers passed the comprehensiveness test. The survey also found that 30 percent of the State's sex-education teachers had never received sex-education training, well above the national average of 18 percent. Although most teachers with training reported that they felt, "very comfortable" teaching adolescents about sex, only 56 percent of those who lacked such training said they felt as comfortable.
"For this study, we set the bar for comprehensiveness fairly low relative to what most medical and public health organizations recommend," said senior author Stacy Tessler Lindau, MD, assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology and medicine at the University of Chicago, "and one out of three programs failed to clear it."
"Our children learn many of the skills they need to be healthy citizens and to take responsibility for their own health in school," she said. "That should include information about sexual aspects of health. Physicians who care for adolescents need to know what students are, or are not learning, in school in order to fill gaps caused by deficits in program content, quality and teacher training."
Previous studies showed that nearly two-thirds of 12th graders have engaged in sexual intercourse, and that accurate knowledge can delay sexual debut and increase the use of condoms or other forms of contraception when adolescents do become sexually active.
"Most parents support school-based sex education and teens regard it as an important source of information," Lindau said, "yet we found that several important health topics and skills are omitted, more often than not, from most Illinois public school sex-education criteria."
"Uninformed teens often become uninformed young adults," said second author Adjoa S. Tetteh, research assistant and a college peer sex educator. "Working with college students, I have witnessed this firsthand. Many students come to college with years of sexual experience, but are learning, for the first time, about effective ways to prevent STIs and unintended pregnancy."
The researchers used data collected by NORC, a survey research firm. NORC mailed self-administered questionnaires to 335 sex education teachers from 201 public middle and high schools in 112 Illinois school districts in the 2003-04 school year. Sixty-two percent of the teachers, representing 91 percent of schools, responded.
Teachers were asked which of 17 possible topics they taught and, if they omitted certain topics, to explain why. They were also asked about their training and how they would grade the sex education curriculum.
The researchers found that 93 percent of Illinois Schools offered sex education; seven percent did not.
The most frequently taught topics, covered by 96 percent of teachers, were HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. Almost 90 percent of teachers covered abstinence. Among those who taught abstinence, 57 percent emphasized that it was the "best alternative," 39 percent said it was the "only alternative," and four percent described it as "one alternative."
Practical skills--such as contraception, condom use, decision-making and communicating with a partner--and morally debated topics, such as abortion or sexual orientation, were among the least frequently taught. Teachers who had not received sex-education training were less likely to spend time on practical or morally debated topics.
Of the 17 topics, emergency contraception was mentioned least, taught by only 30 percent of teachers. Only 32 percent of teachers brought up homosexuality or sexual orientation, 34 percent taught how to use condoms, 37 percent taught how to use other forms of birth control, 39 percent discussed abortion and 47 percent taught students where to access contraception and sexual-health services.
The most common reason for omitting a topic was "not part of the curriculum." Those who omitted condom use, however, most often cited "school or district policy."
Teachers gave themselves the highest grades for instruction on reproductive basics and abstinence, with nearly four out of five ranking that part of the curriculum as good or excellent. About two-thirds gave themselves comparable grades for teaching their students about the emotional consequences of sex, dealing with pressures to have sex, or where to access contraception or services.
Although about half rated their instruction on how to use condoms or other forms of birth control as good or excellent, a quarter rated instruction on these topics average and a quarter rated them as poor or very poor.
"Although a recent study has called into question the effectiveness of abstinence-only sex education, the trend over the last ten years, supported by federal incentives, has been to emphasize abstinence and exclude information about contraception," said Lindau. "Given that a large number of young people are sexually active, we worry that such restrictive approaches leave students unprepared to prevent pregnancy and/or sexually transmitted diseases."
"In most cases," she added, "they are not even given access to information about how to talk about these issues or where to get help should they need it. Doctors need to be aware of this and should be proactive in initiating discussion about sexuality with parents and adolescents. Doctors may also be an important resource for providing teachers with medically accurate information and training."
"Our study provides important new data from the teachers' perspective," said study co-author Melissa Gilliam, associate professor and section chief of family planning and contraceptive research at the University of Chicago. "It supports other recent studies showing that large numbers of teens, especially low-income and youth of color, received no instruction about birth control methods before they first had sex."
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Top Story: Effects of Educational Video Games on Student Achievement
Educational video games have gained acceptance as an instructional tool in our nation's schools, prompting researchers to examine the direct effects on student mathematical achievement.
Therefore, lead researcher Albert Ritzhaupt and his team at the University of North Carolina Wilmington's Watson School of Education will observe nearly 500 middle school students, 15 teachers, technology trainers, and administrators using standards-based educational video games produced by Tabula Digita, an educational gaming company.
The DimensionM instructional video games being used in the study help students absorb the complexities of math by presenting them in a format that is fun and engaging.
"We hope our research will serve to explain further how playing serious, high quality, interactive games influences mathematics achievement and self-efficacy in math," said Ritzhaupt.
From the article: The rapid growth of educational video games as a viable instructional tool has prompted academic researchers at the University of North Carolina Wilmington's Watson School of Education to implement a comprehensive study designed to learn more about the direct effects of educational video games on student mathematical achievement.
Initiated earlier this month, the research effort, led by Albert Ritzhaupt, assistant professor in the Watson School of Education, will observe nearly 500 middle school students and 15 teachers, technology trainers and administrators using Tabula Digita's DimensionM(tm) standards-based educational video games. The participating middle schools in the eastern North Carolina region include: West Pender Middle School and Cape Fear Middle School in Pender County and Trask Middle School and D.C. Virgo Middle School in New Hanover County. "We hope our research will serve to explain further how playing serious, high quality, interactive games influences mathematics achievement and self-efficacy in math," said Ritzhaupt. "Equally important will be to gain a greater understanding of how students react to and interact with gaming in the classroom and how teachers respond to those unique student actions."
The DimensionM instructional video games being used in the study are designed to teach and reinforce key math concepts through a series of cutting-edge, first-person action adventure missions that incorporate three-dimensional graphics, sound, animation and storylines comparable to those in popular video games. Students practice and master math concepts previously discussed in class by successfully navigating a myriad of middle school level math and algebra lessons embedded in the game. The purpose of the game is to help students absorb the complexities of math by presenting them in a format that is fun and engaging.
Joining Ritzhaupt in the research endeavor will be assistant professor Heidi Higgins and technology coordinator/lecturer Beth Allred, both in the Watson School of Education. The study is expected to run until the end of May, with the findings disseminated in a full report in late summer.
Photo opportunities of the research taking place are available.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Most Emailed: High Stakes Testing Under NCLB Undermines Quality Teaching
What constitutes good quality teaching? According to research, the answer is "not No Child Left Behind."
As Congress begins to look at renewing the No Child Left Behind Act, there is clear evidence that the NCLB's focus on high-stakes testing has "actually undermined the quality of teaching in reading and math," says Professor of Education Linda Valli of the University of Maryland.
Professor Valli be heading a program in Teacher Education-Professional Development at UMD, and she recently discussed her findings about NCLB with the University's Endeavors magazine.
"We were simply looking for good teaching practices, but what we found during the study was the shift to high-stakes testing actually undermined the quality of teaching in reading and math. Our data show that what we would call high-quality teaching decreased over that period of time."
Read more of Valli's research and the interview after the jump
From the article:Maryland Associate Professor of Education Linda Valli's research looks at what constitutes good quality teaching. As Congress begins to look at renewing the No Child Left Behind Act, her research provides clear evidence that the NCLB's focus on high-stakes testing has, as Valli says, "actually undermined the quality of teaching in reading and math."
The College of Education's Bruce Jacobs interviewed Prof. Valli soon after it was announced she will hold the inaugural chair of the Jeffrey and David Mullan Professorship in Teacher Education-Professional Development. The interview was conducted for the December issue of Endeavors - a publication aimed at the alumni and friends of the College of Education.
Q - Congratulations on your appointment. What was your reaction to being selected?
My initial reaction was amazement. I am thrilled to have this opportunity to pursue further work in strengthening teacher education. I feel real gratitude to Jean Mullan for being so generous and for affirming the importance of teacher preparation.
Q - What are your plans for this new position?
I am now finishing up a five-year study on fourth and fifth grade reading and math instruction, trying to better understand what good teachers do to help students who are struggling at grade level. Teachers-in-training often understand teaching concepts but do not know how to implement them in the classroom. I will use my new professorship to work with my colleagues here in the department to create computer-simulated experiences of teacher learning - classroom scenarios where pre-service teachers would have to decide what to do based on teacher theory and best practices. These new teacher training tools will help us put into practice what we have learned from our latest research.
Q - What have you learned from that research?
We started planning the study in 2000, before the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act and the subsequent emphasis on testing. We were simply looking for good teaching practices, but what we found during the study was the shift to high-stakes testing actually undermined the quality of teaching in reading and math. Our data show that what we would call high-quality teaching decreased over that period of time. There were declines in teaching higher-order thinking, in the amount of time spent on complex assignments, and in the actual amount of high cognitive content in the curriculum. We believe these declines are related to the pressure teachers were feeling to "teach to the test." Of course this runs counter to the stated idea of NCLB, which is for students to achieve rigorous standards. It is not what we set out to find, but it is what we discovered.
Q - Much of your work over the years has focused on what you call "challenging environments" for teachers. How do you define "challenging?"
One challenge for teachers today is they need to know how to teach a much more racially, ethnically and linguistically diverse range of students - students coming from an increasingly broad range of relatively disadvantaged or advantaged backgrounds: children in poverty, children whose first language is not English, children from well-off families. Another challenge is, because of NCLB, teachers are now called upon to produce very concrete outcomes for students that work against good teaching. Their jobs are increasingly stressful and dissatisfying. They often don't feel supported, they feel the expectations are unrealistic, and they feel they are not able to establish good, human teaching relationships with students because everything is so driven by testing. The task for teacher educators is to help teachers meet these new challenges in ways that are healthy for both them and their students.
Q - How do you see teacher educators accomplishing this?
It is increasingly important for us to help teachers create supportive communities in their schools, to involve parents and to find oases of support among other teachers and administrators. New teachers need to anticipate the necessity to do that. They cannot survive in today's challenging situations without that kind of support. Without it they will continue to flee to higher income suburban schools. It's just too hard for them. That is why I think our simulated environments will be so important as a way of preparing teachers for what they will face.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Deep-Sea Expedition Sets Sail, 20,000+ Students Along for Ride
The team will be conducting research in environments that include scalding heat, high pressure, toxic chemicals and total darkness, as part of the National Science Foundation-funded “Extreme 2008: A Deep-Sea Adventure.”
The scientists are being joined by students from around the world on dry land who have signed up for an exciting virtual field trip. More than 20,000 students from 350 schools in the United States, Aruba, Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, Great Britain and New Zealand are participating.
Team members – researchers and graduate students – are from the University of Delaware, the University of Colorado, University of North Carolina, University of Southern California, J. Craig Venter Institute, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and the University of Waikato, New Zealand.
The team is heading to destinations at two hydrothermal hot spots: Guaymas Basin in the Gulf of California and a group of vents in the eastern Pacific Ocean about nine degrees north of the equator.
Once above the vents, the researchers will take the submersible Alvin down from one to nearly two miles below the surface. Built to withstand crushing pressures and to pierce the utter blackness of the deep, Alvin will let the scientists observe life around the steaming vents and collect samples for analysis. Both Atlantis and Alvin are owned by the U.S. Navy and operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
The scientists' focus will be marine viruses and other tiny life called protists. These organisms prey on bacteria, the primary food for vent dwellers ranging from ghost-white vent crabs to bizarre-looking tubeworms.
“For many years, the vents have been explored with little to no attention to viruses and protists,” Cary says. “Yet because these organisms eat bacteria, they have the most dramatic effect on the bacterial communities that support the vent system. Our research programs are among the first to focus on these remarkable scavengers.”
Eric Wommack, an associate professor with joint appointments in both the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources and the College of Marine and Earth Studies, will join Cary in leading the UD contingent.
Wommack, who is based at the Delaware Biotechnology Institute, is an expert on marine viruses and will be deploying specialized equipment to capture them for analysis in the shipboard lab.
Wommack says hydrothermal vents, although characterized by caustic chemistry, hot temperatures and high pressure, are oases of life in the deep sea. The vents provide an ecosystem for ancient and unusual microbes that are capable of extracting energy from volcanic rather than solar energy, and are home to viruses.
“As a group, viruses are the most abundant biological entities on Earth and contain its largest reservoir of unknown genes,” Wommack says. “We know that bacteria at the deep-sea hydrothermal vents are intimately associated with relatively abundant populations of viruses. Our goal is to explore the wilderness of viral genes existing at the vents.”
David Caron, professor of biological sciences in the Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Southern California, will be studying protozoa, a class of protists that feed on other organisms and that may form a crucial bridge between bacteria and animal life.
If Caron is correct, the samples from the deep will show that protozoa feed on bacteria or on the products of bacterial activity and are in turn eaten by larger life forms. The most surprising thing about the theory may be the lack of evidence for it. While other studies have found a protozoan-animal link in surface waters, the analogous middle step in the deep ocean has been overlooked.
“Protozoa are everywhere and they’re in virtually every environment. They play this intermediate food web role in a number of these environments, and there’s no reason to believe that they aren’t doing the same thing in the vents. It simply hasn’t been looked at to any degree,” Caron said.
As the scientists work at sea, they will be connected to students via an interactive Web site, where blogs, dive logs, video clips, photos and interviews will be posted daily. Students also will be able to write to the scientists, design experiments and participate in a virtual science fair.
A capstone experience for selected schools will be a “Phone Call to the Deep,” linking classrooms with researchers working live in the submersible Alvin on the seafloor.
The University of Delaware and the National Science Foundation are sponsoring the expedition. Additional support is being provided by Olympus and by MO BIO Laboratories.
The program, coordinated by the Office of Communications & Marketing, is the sixth in UD's popular “Extreme” series, which has won state and national awards for public education.
