Ask the average kid what their favorite subject in school is and they are likely to answer “recess!”.
While the quip is bound to make adults chuckle, the kids may be onto something as it turns out that the benefits of recess time are no laughing matter.
“New brain research is drawing clear links between physical activity and learning,” writes Caralee Adams in her article “Recess Makes Kids Smarter” for Scholastic.
Surprisingly, in a country with a serious childhood obesity problem with the CDC estimating that 18.5 percent or 13.7 million American children and adolescents were obese, recess time has suffered the same chopping block fate as physical education courses.
"Competing priorities in schools for higher test scores have resulted in physical activities of all kinds being reduced," Francesca Zavacky, project director for the National Association for Sport and Physical Education, told Adams. "It comes down to dollars. The focus is not on the well-rounded student."
Reasons Behind Shrinking Recess Time
Parents not involved in the educational system may just assume that kids will have the same recess experiences they had when they were younger but that is not the case.
In “Time to Play: Increasing Daily Recess in Elementary Schools” Alyssa Buccella wrote in 2019 that, “since 2001 average weekly recess time in U.S. schools has declined by 60 minutes.”
Buccella says that elementary students now get an average of 25 minutes of recess per day.
Even more distressing is that Buccella points out that over 75 percent of school districts do not have formal policies mandating daily recess with individual schools and teachers left to make recess decisions.
The trend to less recess dates back even longer than the 21st century as Adams says recess started shrinking in the late 1980s. Adams says reasons for average recess becoming shorter can be attributed to several factors including:
- School districts under pressure from No Child Left Behind legislation shifted to more in-classroom instruction.
- School districts concerned about safety and liability issues of recess play.
- Lack of supervision due to cuts in education funding for recess time.
- Aging infrastructure and subpar playground equipment available for recess play.
Benefits of Recess
There may be a misguided notion that the longer kids stay in their chairs at school and stay on task they will learn more and test higher, but research does not support that idea, according to Olga Jarrett, a leading researcher on recess and associate professor of early childhood education at Georgia State University.
"There is this assumption that if you keep kids working longer, they will learn more," Jarrett told Adams. "It's misguided."
Adams says that research shows that recess has the following benefits for children:
- More on task in the classroom and less fidgety.
- Show improved memory and more focused attention.
- Develop more brain connections.
- Learn negotiation skills during recess.
- Exercise leadership skills, learn to teach others, learn to take turns, and figure out how to resolve conflicts while playing with others.
- More physically active both before and after school if they are active at recess.
Recess, many argue, has intrinsic advantages over structured physical education classes.
"With recess, children have choices and can organize their own games, figure out what's fair, and learn a lot of social behavior that they don't learn in P.E.," Jarrett said in the Scholastic article.
“LiiNKing” Recess to Improved Behavior
The LiiNK Project, led by Dr. Debbie Rhea, a professor of kinesiology and the associated dean of research and health sciences at Texas Christian University, was developed to add recess back into the elementary school schedule.
According to Buccella, the main components of LiiNK are four 15-minute unstructured outdoor play breaks per day, with a goal to have an outdoor play break after every 45 to 90 minutes of in-class instruction.
Insights from studying the LiiNk Project are the benefits schools gain by improved behaviors of children while they are in the classroom. Research found that:
- Schools with LiiNK showed a major decline in off-task behaviors from fall to spring of 58 percent to 17.9 percent. Schools not using the program showed an increase of off-task behaviors as the year went on with a rise from fall to spring of 51.3 percent to 55.7 percent.
- Appropriate behaviors also showed marked improvement in schools with LiiNK, from 50 percent to 76 percent from fall to spring. Those not with LiiNK showed slight improvement as the year wore on, from 61 percent to 64 percent, well below the improvement of those schools with the extra outdoor time.
The takeaway was that students with more recess time were getting the mental and physical breaks they needed to learn effectively and as a result, teachers reported spending less time redirecting behavior and re-teaching content.
At Churchich Recreation we understand the importance of a reliable, safe, and innovative program for your school’s recess time. Contact us today to learn more about our full-service, turnkey one-of-kind playground experience.