Attention Exercises for Students

Maintaining the attention span of children is getting harder and harder. Increased screen time, visually appealing videos, and other distractions are always bombarding students. Teachers and parents want to help the kids but may not know where to start. One idea is to try attention exercises for students.

Coordination Attention Exercises for Students – What Does the Research Say?

One suggestion is to try coordination exercises with your students. Perceptual and Motor Skills published research on the effects of an acute session of coordination exercises in physical education on the attention of  90 primary school children.

The experimental group consisted of 48 children who received a cognitively demanding physical education 45 minute lesson consisting of different coordination exercises.  The control group consisted of 42 children who attended a normal sedentary school lesson learning language skills.

The coordination tasks were cognitively demanding physical activities that required specific higher-order cognitive processes, such as executive functions.

The experimental group lessons consisted of:

• starting with 7 minutes of running to music where specific actions had to be performed based on certain words that were said in the song (ie touch the ground when a certain word was sung).
• completed exercises in 6 different stations with various levels of difficulty.  Some examples of the stations were:
  • balance on a bench while bouncing a basketball in one hand and a volleyball.
  • catch a ball with a certain hand based on the color of the ball.
  • obstacle course and pass a ball to a partner a certain way based on the color of the ball.

Each participant was evaluated before, immediately after and 90 minutes after each experimental condition with the d2 Test of Attention.

Results of the Study

The results of the student on attention exercises for students indicated the following:

• children’s attentional performance increased in the experimental group that participated in the physical education lesson, not immediately but 90 min. after completion of the coordination exercises.

The authors concluded that delayed attention span benefits from acute physical activity are important for the overall learning process, because increased attention is a necessary component to achieve academic success.

So next time you need your students to stay focused and attend, why not try cognitively demanding coordination exercises about 90 minutes BEFORE you start the lesson.

Need to stay focused during homework time? Try coordination exercises 90 minutes BEFORE you start the homework.

Take your own data to determine if it helps your student. Compare time on task with the attention exercises and without to determine if it will help your student!

Reference: Mirko Schmidt, Fabienne Egger, and Achim Conzelmann (2015) DELAYED POSITIVE EFFECTS OF AN ACUTE BOUT OF COORDINATIVE EXERCISE ON CHILDREN’S ATTENTION. Perceptual and Motor Skills: Volume 121, Issue , pp. 431-446.

Need more ideas?

This Impulse Control Games for Kids will challenge executive functioning skills and adds in physical activity.  You can download it for free here.

25+ Bilateral Coordination Exercises – Download of 28 bilateral coordination exercise sheets including QR codes with links to video demonstration of exercises. Also includes hand out explaining bilateral coordination.

Yoga Skip Counting – this is an example of a cognitively demanding physical activity!