Don't Just Sit There!

Conventional wisdom dictates that if you get aerobic exercise at least a few times a week, this will offset hours spent sitting at the computer or on the sofa. A growing body of research on inactivity, however, suggests that this is not the case. "Exercise is not a perfect antidote for sitting," says Marc Hamilton, an inactivity researcher at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, LA. Being sedentary for nine hours a day is detrimental to one's health whether that person goes home and watches TV or goes out for a 10-mile run. Essentially, short bursts of aerobic activity simply can't compensate for the harm done to our bodies during long periods of sitting.

Indeed, for the 20 researchers who gathered (most likely on their feet) at Stanford University last summer to host a conference on the science of sitting, this was not news.  They focused on what occurs when people sit, when the body's postural muscles aren't engaged. Electrical activity in the muscles drops, which leads to a cascade of harmful metabolic effects:

• A person's calorie-burning rate immediately plunges to about a third of what it would be if he were mobile
• Insulin effectiveness drops within a single day
• The risk of developing Type-2 diabetes or heart disease rises
• The enzymes that are responsible for breaking down lipids plunge, which in turn causes the level of good (HDL) cholesterol to fall

In his recent book, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, Harvard psychiatrist Dr. John Ratey discusses how exercise can improve a child's attention, memory, focus, and retention of information. Read more about exercise and the brain here. 

It therefore seems wise to incorporate bursts of low-level physical activity into the classroom, where children are accustomed to sitting for hours on end.

"One of the problems with our school system," Friedlander said, "is we have all these kids, and they're running around, and they're very energetic, and they're playing all these games. And then we take them into school, and we say, 'Sit down and be still.' And it's one of the worst things we can do for their health."

More gym class is not the solution. Studies have shown that kids self-select for activities: those who are already physically active generally opt for high-intensity sports, while those who might benefit the most from physical education classes can get by with minimal exertion. So how can we adjust the school schedule to improve student health? Friedlander and others think that simple innovations in the classroom environment could provide the best health benefits for school-budget dollars.  

The changes could be as easy as inserting an official 10-minute break in 90-minute class periods, bringing standing desks and yoga balls into classrooms, or simply training teachers to incorporate more physical activity into their lesson plans. Or, what about a chair-free first-grade classroom where the students spend part of each day crawling along mats labeled with vocabulary words and jumping between platforms while reciting math problems?

Likewise, David Plank, executive director of the research center Policy Analysis for California Education, has a similar perspective towards our children's classrooms: "imagine a 9-year-old sitting for six hours drilling math facts, and how much fun that would be, and how much enthusiasm that would generate in that student. And then say, is this really what we want school to be about? Do we just want to chain kids to their desks and keep them there till they can add three-digit numbers? Or do we want kids to actually maybe like coming to school?" 

A Practice Test for a Practice Test

Do middle schoolers really need another test? Parents and educators are asking this question in response to the College Board's release of its newest test, called ReadiStep. It is a two-hour test for eighth-graders that has questions written in the same style as the PSAT and SAT, with three 40-minute sections to assess skills in critical reading, writing, and mathematics.  The marking system is also similar: scores range from 2 to 8, which corresponds with the 20 to 80 on the PSAT and the 200 to 800 on the SAT.

The College Board says it created the test in response to school districts' requests for an indication of students' potential performance earlier than the 10^th or 11^th grade PSAT. Glenn B. Milewski, executive director of ReadiStep and the PSAT says, "It is essentially a learning tool. It's intended to help schools and districts improve their curricula and instructional practices." Is it really necessary, however, in a culture that is already so obsessed with the admissions process, to subject eighth-graders to one more test and to expose them even earlier to anxiety about high school?

Yes, because if you want to excel at these standardized tests, you have to practice. So says Margo Gigee, the director of advanced academics for the Pearland Independent School District, in a Houston, Texas suburb (the majority of the quarter- million eighth graders who have already taken the test are in Texas). And if, as the College Board promotes, the test results provide "information on the skills that students possess and the skills they need to develop," then ideally students should be able to learn how and where they need to improve before they reach high school.

Other experts on testing worry that the College Board is preying on parental fears about their children's readiness for college entrance exams. Professor W. James Popham of UCLA, who studied the psychometrics underlying ReadiStep, was interviewed for a recent article in The New York Times. He contends that the test is insufficient in that it will produce deceptive results that "convey the notion that your child has these strengths and weaknesses, when there's no way to tell." He concluded that any results should be taken with a grain of salt because of insufficient items "to allow teachers, students or students' parents to arrive at a reasonably accurate estimate of a student's per-skill prowess." 

In light of budget cuts and stretched-tight finances in many school systems, the debate might just be resolved by the $8 per student cost of the exam.