Gym2Learn: Better schoolresults through more sports
 | In the school year 2011-2012 3rd grade pupils of the Grotius college for secondary education in Heerlen will start every day with a gymnastics class. This in order to find out if more sport leads to better school results. The research is done by CELSTEC. |
Gym2Learn
The project that Grotius College and Open Universiteit have started is called Gym2Learn.
Loes Sieben, location director of the Grotius College: "From the 3rd grade we notice a decline in the motivation, concentration and learning results of mavo-students. For boys this is even more noticable than for girls. We hope that we can stop this decline by making the pupils do more sports at school." In the Gym2Learn project one half of the pupils start each day with a gym class of one hour. The other half of the pupils have their regular programme. After 15 weeks the groups trade places.
Puberty
CELSTEC will investigate if there is a causal relationship between fysical activities and school results. Renate de Groot, coordinator of the research topic Brain, lifestyle and learning: "Previous research shows that fysical activities is good for the brain. But this has never been investigated with children in this age category, the puberty, even though we know that the brain is going through an important development in this phase of life. In our research we do not only take into account, age, gender and lifestyle, but also the phase of the puberty. The Open Universiteit will investigate what the effect of increased fysical activities is cognition, motvation, self confidence, mood, visual attention (measured by eye movement registration) and learning results."
