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Why PE Should Be Required from Kindergarten to College
Physical activity improves mental and physical health… and grades.
Any parent of a fidgety kid knows that forcing a student to sit in a classroom several hours a day with little or no physical activity is a recipe for poor academic performance and lots of notes home from the principal. Our youngest son endured a K-12 education in which recess was rare and PE largely nonexistent. “No kid ever wants to sit still for five minutes,” he says now, weeks away from high school graduation. “Let alone seven hours.”
Science is on his side.
The benefits of physical activity on health, mental well-being and brain power for children and adults are well established. Almost any physical activity can make people smarter, studies show. And exercise has been clearly shown to improve academic performance among K-12 students.
Meanwhile, an emerging body of work indicates physical activity can improve GPA for university students and may also reduce dropout rates. Research also suggests that exercise habits picked up from adolescence through college tend to stick with people for life.
Armed with all this evidence, an increasing number of researchers, educators and health advocates are calling for the return of PE in K-12 schools and even favor mandating physical-education instruction at the collegiate level.
“I think all students could benefit from a physical education course in college,” says Kerri Vasold, a Michigan State University researcher who led a study on the topic published Feb. 25 in the Journal of College Student Retention.
GPA Up
At the end of their freshman year at MSU, students who played intramural sports had a 3.25 GPA, compared to 3.07 for those who didn’t play, Vasold and her colleagues found. The students also dropped or failed fewer classes, and they were 40% more likely to return in the fall as sophomores.
The study does not show cause-and-effect, the researchers say, but they did control for high school GPA, gender, race, socioeconomic status and other factors.
“Students who are considered sedentary may not have found a type of activity that they enjoy yet…
