A new Dartmouth study Dartmouth
study shows 12 minutes of exercise can improve attention and reading
comprehension in low-income adolescents, suggesting that schools serving
low-income populations should work brief bouts of exercise into their daily
schedules.
The study, published as part of the June volume of Frontiers in
Psychology, compared low-income adolescents with their high-income peers. While
both groups saw improvement in selective visual attention up to 45 minutes
after exercising, the low-income group experienced a bigger jump. (Selective visual
attention is the ability to remain visually focused on something despite
distractions.) The low-income students also improved on tests of reading
comprehension following the physical activity, but the high-income students did
not.
Study author Michele Tine , assistant professor of education and
principal investigator in the Poverty and Learning Lab at Dartmouth, suspects
the two groups respond to exercise differently because they experience
different levels of stress in life.
"Low-income individuals experience more stress than
high-income individuals, and stress impacts the same physiological systems that
acute aerobic exercise activates," Tine said. "Physiological measures
were beyond the scope of this study, but low-income participants did report experiencing
more stress. Alternatively, it is possible that low-income individuals improved
more simply because they had more room to improve."
This study is a follow-up to one Tine published in 2012. The
earlier study found that brief aerobic exercise improved selective visual
attention among children, with low-income participants experiencing the biggest
improvement. Tine's latest study shows the effect holds true for adolescents
(participants this time ranged from 17 to 21). It also explores, for the first
time, exercise's effects on reading comprehension, an important research area
because the gap between low- and high-income adolescents' reading comprehension
is growing steadily.
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