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To date, however, no study specifically had examined whether andin what ways physical fitness might affect how children learn. Soresearchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaignrecently stepped into that breach, recruiting a group of local 9-and 10-year-old boys and girls, testing their aerobic fitness on atreadmill, and then asking 24 of the most fit and 24 of the leastfit to come into the exercise physiology lab and work on somedifficult memorization tasks.
Learning is, of course, a complex process, involving not onlythe taking in and storing of new information in the form ofmemories, a process known as encoding, but also recalling thatinformation later. Information that cannot be recalled has notreally been learned.
Earlier studies of children’s learning styles have shown thatmost learn more readily if they are tested on material while theyare in the process of learning it. In effect, if they are quizzedwhile memorizing, they remember more easily. Straight memorization,without intermittent reinforcement during the process, is tougher,although it is also how most children study.
In this case, the researchers opted to use both approaches tolearning, by providing their young volunteers with iPads onto whichseveral maps of imaginary lands had been loaded. The maps weredemarcated into regions, each with a four-letter name. During onelearning session, the children were shown these names in place forsix seconds. The names then appeared on the map in their correctposition six additional times while children stared at and tried tomemorize them.
In a separate learning session, region names appeared on adifferent map in their proper location, then moved to the marginsof the map. The children were asked to tap on a name and match itwith the correct region, providing in-session testing as theymemorized.
A day later, all of the children returned to the lab and wereasked to correctly label the various maps’ regions.
The results, published last week in PLoS One, show that, overall, the children performed similarly when they were asked torecall names for the map when their memorization was reinforced bytesting.
But when the recall involved the more difficult type of learning— memorizing without intermittent testing — the children who werein better aerobic condition significantly outperformed the less-fitgroup, remembering about 40 percent of the regions’ namesaccurately, compared with barely 25 percent accuracy for theout-of-shape kids.
This finding suggests that “higher levels of fitness have theirgreatest impact in the most challenging situations†that childrenface intellectually, the study’s authors write. The more difficultsomething is to learn, the more physical fitness may aid childrenin learning it.
