Physical activity and academic performance in high school students

Abstract

There are still doubts about the real benets of physical activity on the academic performance of adolescents. The aim of this study was to determine whether the physical activity (PA) interferes in the academic performance of high school students.The study included 348 adolescents from one fed- eral public school. For information regarding PA, the International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ short-version) was used. For PAL classication the adolecents who had 300 minutes/week or more of physical activity were considered as active. The information related to the participation in sports schools was obtained through a question inserted in IPAQ. For the academic performance, the average grades of the rst semester of 2015 were used, within the three major Knowledge Areas, as dened by the National Curriculum Standards. ere was no signicant correlation between academic performance and PA (r= 0.06; p= 0.28). Higher minimum scores were found among active high school students and higher average school for areas 1 – Languages, Codes and its Technologies (7.2±0.8) and 2 – Natural Sciences, Mathematics and its Technologies (6.6±1.3) among participants in sports schools, with statistical signicance (p= 0.017; p= 0.014). In conclusion, PAL did not relate to the academic performance of pupils in this study and participants of sports schools achieved better academic performance demonstrating that sports activities can cause benecial eects in their cognitive performances.