Table 2.
Summary of the results included systematic reviews.
| Author, Year | Results | |
|---|---|---|
| Overall Academic Achievement Effect | Subject-Specific Effect | |
| Sibley and Etnier, 2003 [39] | There is a small significant relationship between PA and AA in children. | Mathematics and verbal tests showed very small effects. |
| Strong et al., 2005 [42] | The addition of PE to the curriculum results in small positive gains in AP. The quasi-experimental data also suggest that allocating more curricular time to programs of PA does not negatively affect AA, even when the time allocated to other subjects is reduced. Some results also suggest a relative increase in AP per unit of time. Cross-sectional observations show a positive association between PA and AP. | N/A |
| Murray et al., 2007 [43] | Strong evidence suggests a lack of negative effects of PE programs on AA. | A positive trend toward increased arithmetic scores, but no significant changes in reading scores when compared with controls. No significant difference was noted between groups on the mathematics or composite basic battery scores. |
| Trudeau and Shephard, 2008 [44] | Studies suggest that sport is more likely to benefit AA if offered in school rather than in other sports contexts. Adding time to “academic” or “curricular” subjects by taking time from PE programmes does not enhance grades and may be detrimental to health. | N/A |
| Fedewa and Ahn, 2011 [27] | There was a small effect between PA and AA. | Small to medium effects on mathematics, reading and language; null effect for science. |
| Rasberry et al., 2011 [9] | Mixed findings: PA is positively associated with AP (50.5% of the associations summarised) or has a null effect (48% of the associations). | Reported in subgroups according to the type of PA, however association or otherwise with AA not reported separately. |
| Singh et al., 2012 [45] | Authors found strong evidence of a significant positive relationship between PA and AP. | Positive effects on language skills, reading skills and a basic test battery; there was no significant difference for mathematics. |
| Haapala, 2012 [40] | N/A | In four studies, three reported a positive effect of physical training on mathematical, reading, and language skills. |
| Lees and Hopkins, 2013 [41] | Aerobic PA is positively associated with AA. | Non-significant effects for mathematics, language, and sciences. |
| Pucher, Boot and de Vries, 2013 [46] | School health promotion intervention showed that interventions targeting PA and nutrition had a small to large effects on AP, and no negative effects occurred. | Effects of different kinds of interventions varied in size and across subjects like mathematics and language. Also, positive effects were observed in subjects from which time was taken for the intervention, e.g., for additional PE. |
| Busch et al., 2014 [47] | In general, team sports had an overall positive impact on AA, while individual sports had no effect. | N/A |
| Martin et al., 2014 [28] | Null effects were found for overall AA. | Overall, null effects were found for mathematics, reading and language. |
| Conde and Tercedor, 2015 [26] | Regarding the association between PA and AP, when it was assessed with Grade Point Average: 11 studies found a positive association, one study with no association and one study with a negative association; when evaluated with other instruments—four studies found at least one positive outcome. | N/A |
| Esteban-Cornejo et al., 2015 [48] | Four studies showed no effect of PA on AP, one showed a negative association, and 11 showed a positive association. PA was more strongly associated with AA among girls than boys. | N/A |
| Ferreira-Vorkapic et al., 2015 [29] | Yoga had null effects on AP. | N/A |
| Mura et al., 2015 [49] | The majority of the studies showed positive between PA interventions and AA. | N/A |
| Norris et al., 2015 [50] | In the two studies assessing PA and AA, there was a significant improvement. | One study showed significant improvement across all subjects, the other only in social sciences. |
| Donnelly et al., 2016 [17] | Physically active lessons in general result in improvements in AA, and the addition of PE time does not; there are positive effects for acute PA on AA. | Mixed results regarding mathematics, reading and spelling. |
| Poitras et al., 2016 [51] | PA resulted in mixed-effects (small or null) on AA according to the study design. | N/A |
| Spruit et al., 2016 [30] | A significant small-to-medium mean effect size of 0.367 was found for PA interventions on AA in adolescents. Larger effects were found for grades compared to standardised achievement tests. | N/A |
| Álvarez-Bueno et al., 2017 [31] | AA is improved by increasing school time dedicated to PE. | Increasing curricular PE programs benefited mathematics-related skills, reading, and composite scores. Integrating PA into lessons benefited performance in mathematics only. |
| Li et al., 2017 [52] | AP demonstrated a significant improvement with exercise in one of two studies. | One study showed a significant beneficial effect of PA on mathematics, while another study had a small effect without statistical significance. |
| Marques et al., 2017 [53] | Seven articles found a positive association between PE or school-based PA and AP, four found no association, and in one there was a positive association for third-grade students and a negative association for second-grade students. | N/A |
| Martin and Murtagh, 2017 [55] | Studies reporting learning outcomes (including AA) showed positive effects of physically active academic lessons on AA. | N/A |
| Ruiz-Ariza et al., 2017 [56] | Mixed findings, with the majority of studies showing positive associations. | N/A |
| Schneider, Pharr and Bungum, 2017 [57] | N/A | Two studies found that students who were involved in gardening significantly increased their science test scores. |
| Watson et al., 2017 [32] | Classroom-based PA had a small positive effect on AA when a progress monitoring tool was used. | N/A |
| Marques et al., 2018 [54] | Objectively measured PA was inconsistently related to AA, although four studies of strong quality provided partial support for a positive relationship. Self-reported PA was positively associated with AA. | Mixed results between studies. |
| Daly-Smith et al., 2018 [58] | The study of physically active learning found no effect on AA, while the study of classroom movement break found a positive effect on AA (when breaks were at least 10 min). | Mixed results for mathematics. |
| de Greeff et al., 2018 [33] | No overall significant effect of acute PA on AA in children aged 6–12 years, but there was a small to moderate effect from longitudinal PA. | For acute PA, a small to moderate effect was found for spelling. No significant effects of acute PA were found for mathematics and reading. No significant effects of chronic PA were found for mathematics, reading, or spelling. |
| Martin et al., 2018 [34] | Compared with the usual routine, PA interventions have no beneficial effect on AA. | Null effects of PA on AA for mathematics and reading. |
| Bedard et al., 2019 [35] | A small positive effect of active classrooms was found, compared with traditional (sedentary) classrooms. | Positive effects found for language and geography; null effects for mathematics, reading, spelling, and science. |
| Gunnell et al., 2019 [59] | Results suggest that chronic and acute bouts of PA are favourable or at least not detrimental to cognitive function. | One study found moderate-intensity exercise had null (for sentence comprehension), favourable (spelling and reading), and unfavourable (math) effects on AA, compared to seated rest. Vigorous and moderate-intensity exercise groups combined had null (reading, sentence comprehension), favourable (spelling), and unfavourable (arithmetic) results on AA, compared to seated rest. Moderate-intensity exercise had null (spelling, reading, arithmetic, and sentence comprehension) results on AA, compared to vigorous exercise. |
| Phansikar et al., 2019 [24] | N/A | Active commuting to and from school was not significantly associated with mathematics. |
| Ruiz-Hermosa et al., 2019 [23] | N/A | Active commuting to and from school was not significantly associated with mathematics and language. |
| Singh et al., 2019 [60] | Inconclusive evidence for a beneficial effect of PA on overall AP. | Strong evidence for the beneficial effect of PA on mathematics and inconclusive evidence for language. |
| Sneck et al., 2019 [36] | N/A | Small to medium effects were found for mathematics. |
| Chacón-Cuberos et al., 2020 [61] | Most of the studies that addressed AP using the scores obtained in non-standardised tests showed PA results improved AP. Interventions with higher exercise intensity and duration led to more pronounced improvements in AP. | Two studies found that active learning and the introduction of active breaks improved AP in children with lower grades. Three studies found that the benefits of their intervention programmes were more closely associated with improvements in mathematics, with particular emphasis on arithmetic, while not finding any relationship with reading comprehension. |
| Dudley and Burden, 2020 [37] | Increasing the proportion of the curriculum allocated to PE had small positive effects on student learning. | N/A |
| Masini et al., 2020 [38] | Inconclusive evidence was found regarding the effect of school-based interventions of active breaks on AA. | N/A |
| Vetter et al., 2020 [62] | N/A | Four of the six studies reported statistically significant improvements in reading, but ES was small. The RCTs assessing spelling reported significantly better improvement in intervention, compared with control, with ES = 0.45; significant improvements were seen on English, reading, and spelling. |
AA, Academic Achievement; AP, Academic Performance; ES: Effect Size; N/A, Not Applicable; PA, Physical Activity; PE, Physical Education; RCT, Randomised Controlled Trial.