Why Do Schools Flunk Biology? - By LynNell Hancock - part 2
Then there's gym — another expendable hour by most school standards. Only 36% of schoolchildren today are required to participate in daily physical education. Yet researchers now know that exercise is good not only for the heart. It also juices up the brain, feeding it nutrients in the form of glucose and increasing nerve connections — all of which make it easier for kids of all ages to learn. Neuroscientist William Greenough confirmed this by watching rats at his University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign lab. One group did nothing. A second exercised on an automatic treadmill. A third was set loose in a Barnum & Bailey obstacle course requiring the rats to perform acrobatic feats. These “supersmart” rats grew “an enormous amount of gray matter” compared with their sedentary partners, says Greenough.
Of course, children don't ordinarily run such gantlets; still, Greenough believes, the results are significant. Numerous studies, he says, show that children who exercise regularly do better in school.
The implication for schools goes beyond simple exercise. Children also need to be more physically active in the classroom, not sitting quietly in their seats memorizing subtraction tables. Knowledge is retained longer if children connect not only aurally but emotionally and physically to the material, says University of Oregon education professor Robert Sylwester in “A Celebration of Neurons.”
Good teachers know that lecturing on the American Revolution is far less effective than acting out a battle. Angles and dimensions are better understood if children chuck their work sheets and build a complex model to scale. The smell of the glue enters memory through one sensory system, the touch of the wood blocks another, the sight of the finished model still another. The brain then creates a multi-dimensional mental model of the experience — one easier to retrieve. “Explaining a smell,” says Sylwester, “is not as good as actually smelling it.”
- Why Do Schools Flunk Biology? - part 1
- Why Do Schools Flunk Biology? - part 2
- Why Do Schools Flunk Biology? - part 3