by Sonali Khera, General Contributor Past research has shown that being active and academic success go hand in hand! But how could exercise help you do better in school? And does sitting down at a desk for long-periods of time help students get better grades? This year, a group of researchers from Eastern Washington University helped answer these questions. First, let’s talk about academic success. The two main building blocks for academic success are grit and resilience. Grit means putting continuous effort into your work and having the persistence to work towards the same goal over a long period of time. Resilience means to pick yourself up and dust yourself off when life throws obstacles at you. In other words, it means finding the motivation in ourselves to keep moving forward. The researchers from Eastern Washington University are one of the first to explore if physical activity is connected to grit and resilience for academic success. Their research study had two main purposes. First, they explored if there were any connections between a student’s grit, resilience, levels of exercise, or time spent sitting, and if grit or resilience, specifically, connected any of those variables together. For example, could being more resilient because of increased exercise only be possible when grit is involved? Second, they explored if different levels of physical activity or time spent sitting changed how much resilience or grit a student had. The researchers recruited 249 undergraduate students who were attending a university in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Each of these students completed a survey online. The survey was made up of three questionnaires. The first one had questions about a student’s usual physical activity over a week, and their sitting habits on a usual weekday. Students answered questions about their level of grit and resilience in the last two questionnaires. The researchers analyzed the students’ answers from the survey and found that students who did intense exercise for 75 minutes or more per week had higher levels of resilience in comparison to students who did less than this amount. Students who did intense exercise for more than 300 minutes per week had much higher levels of grit in comparison to students who did less than 75 minutes per week. Students who sat more than 8 hours a day had lower levels of grit in comparison to students who sat three to five hours a day. Moreover, they found that increased levels of both medium and intense exercise are only connected to increased levels of the first aspect of grit (i.e. putting continuous effort into your work). This connection between exercise and effort is linked by increased levels of resilience. Future research should focus on further exploring the connections found in this study. If another researcher were to replicate this study, they must consider how to more accurately calculate the amount of physical activity and sitting a student does. For example, the survey questions should ask about a student’s time spent sitting throughout the week, and not just on a weekday. Finally, future studies should include students with different backgrounds (e.g. students from a different region, students in a different grade, etc…). The results of this study support that there may be a link between grit, resilience, and physical activity. Unfortunately, previous research has shown that when students enter their first year of post-secondary education, physical activity decreases. Let this be a warning to all freshmen: Keep up the exercise if you are aiming for academic success! Medium to intense exercise may help motivate you to stick to your goals, to put effort into them, and to keep moving forward. Sonali is an recent graduate from the Psychology undergraduate program at the University of Guelph. Are you interested in submitting a post to GetPsyched? Make sure you fill out our submission form and send it back to us so we can showcase your ideas! Edited by Nida Ansari. References:
Dunston, E. R., Messina, E. S., Coelho, A. J., Chriest, S. N., Waldrip, M. P., Vahk, A., & Taylor, K. (2022). Physical activity is associated with grit and resilience in college students: Is intensity the key to success?. Journal of American College Health, 70(1), 216-222. https://doi.org/10.1080/07448481.2020.1740229
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