Oral Presentations - Session 1D: UC 331
THE EFFECTS OF EXERCISE ON ACADEMIC TESTING
Presentation Type
Presentation
Faculty Mentor’s Full Name
Steven Gaskill
Faculty Mentor’s Department
Health and Human Performance
Abstract / Artist's Statement
Health professionals claim that those who are active will perform better cognitively. Researchers have shown that school aged children achieve higher GPAs when meeting the Surgeon Generals Guidelines for physical activity. Questions remain about the benefit of physical activity immediately before academic tests. Our goal was to analyze immediate cognitive responses following an acute bout of exercise. In trials, 68 voluntary participants (44 females, 24 males, 23.5 ± 3 years) completed both a sedentary and exercise trial, followed by a short academic test on different weeks. During the exercise trial, volunteers participated in 20 minutes of Zumba exercise and walked 5 minutes to a testing site. During the sedentary trial, participants sat for 25 minutes and listened to a collegiate lecture. For both trials, the participants completed a reading comprehension test made of 7 questions concerning 2 paragraphs of literature taken from practice GRE tests. Subjects also completed a questionnaire that included age, RPE during Zumba, food and caffeine intake, and hours of sleep. The overall test scores for the two trials were normalized to the first set of results to remove statistical error and then exercise and sedentary trials were compared with a dependent t-test with p<0.05. Results found there was a difference between the test scores of the sedentary and exercise test groups, with the sedentary group scoring slightly above the exercise group. The t-test, however, did not yield a statistically significant difference and does not disprove the positive impact of exercise on cognitive function.
Category
Life Sciences
THE EFFECTS OF EXERCISE ON ACADEMIC TESTING
UC 331
Health professionals claim that those who are active will perform better cognitively. Researchers have shown that school aged children achieve higher GPAs when meeting the Surgeon Generals Guidelines for physical activity. Questions remain about the benefit of physical activity immediately before academic tests. Our goal was to analyze immediate cognitive responses following an acute bout of exercise. In trials, 68 voluntary participants (44 females, 24 males, 23.5 ± 3 years) completed both a sedentary and exercise trial, followed by a short academic test on different weeks. During the exercise trial, volunteers participated in 20 minutes of Zumba exercise and walked 5 minutes to a testing site. During the sedentary trial, participants sat for 25 minutes and listened to a collegiate lecture. For both trials, the participants completed a reading comprehension test made of 7 questions concerning 2 paragraphs of literature taken from practice GRE tests. Subjects also completed a questionnaire that included age, RPE during Zumba, food and caffeine intake, and hours of sleep. The overall test scores for the two trials were normalized to the first set of results to remove statistical error and then exercise and sedentary trials were compared with a dependent t-test with p<0.05. Results found there was a difference between the test scores of the sedentary and exercise test groups, with the sedentary group scoring slightly above the exercise group. The t-test, however, did not yield a statistically significant difference and does not disprove the positive impact of exercise on cognitive function.