Exercise and Achievement - SPARK by John Ratey - Jan 09
Exercise boosts achievement—here’s where to find the proof.
SPARK by Dr. John Ratey (Harvard) is a gold mine of research and information we can use to communicate the effectiveness of movement and exercise on learning. Check it out!
I had placed a pre-publication order for the book, but it sat on my shelf waiting to be opened until I finished the Greenville-Atlanta workshops. Thanks to the person in Atlanta who pointed out that it’s exactly what we’ve been looking for. Reading it was like Christmas—hmmm.
Here’s an excerpt from the Introduction to Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain by John J. Ratey, MD (Little Brown) 2008.
“In Naperville Illinois, gym class has transformed the student body of nineteen thousand into perhaps the fittest in the nation…In 1999 Naperville’s eighth graders were among some 230,000 students from around the world who took an international standards test called TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study), which evaluates knowledge of math and science. In recent years, students in China, Japan, and Singapore have outpaced American kids in these crucial subjects, but Naperville is the conspicuous exception: when its students took the TIMSS, they finished sixth in math and first in the world in science.” (Page 8)
Special thanks to Dr. Julian Reed of Furman University in Greenville, we have more ammunition. He and colleagues conducted their own study--abstract is attached with his permission. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation also funded research conducted by Active Learning, accessible at www.activelivingresearch.org.
Watch for Dr Reed’s book due out in 2009: Active Education: Lessons for Integrating Physical Activity with Language Arts, Math, Science and Social Studies (Nova Publishers 2009) More information on his work is available at his website: www.moveintheclassroom.com
This should help each of us gather the resources we’ll need to make our case for healthy movement, and help all the brains we’re trying to boost.
Happy New Year!
Sandi
© Sandra Sunquist Stanton MS, NCC, LPC, Connections of the Heart LLC