Does doing The Daily Mile for longer boost pupils' minds?
Children who had done The Daily Mile for more than a few months were slightly fitter, but they did not think better or feel better than children who did not take part.
Source
The Impact of the Daily Mile™ on School Pupils' Fitness, Cognition, and Wellbeing: Findings From Longer Term Participation
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — One-time measurement comparing pupils grouped by teacher-reported Daily Mile participation (none, 2 months or less, longer), adjusted for age, sex and area deprivation.
- N
- N=6908 · 6908 pupils included in analysis (474 shorter-term, 1004 longer-term, 5430 non-participants) out of 7337 who gave any data; fitness analyses had fewer pupils.
- Population
- UK primary-school pupils, mean age 10.2 years, in classes registered for the BBC Terrific Scientific programme
- Outcome
- Inhibition (stop-signal), visual-spatial and verbal working memory, affect and alertness ratings, and 20-m shuttle-run fitness
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
Teachers across the UK registered their classes in a BBC citizen-science project and reported whether and for how long pupils had done The Daily Mile, a roughly 15-minute daily run or walk. Pupils completed computer tasks of inhibition, visual-spatial and verbal working memory, rated how good and how awake they felt, and did a bleep (shuttle-run) fitness test. The researchers compared longer-term, shorter-term and non-participants, adjusting for age, sex and area deprivation, and tested whether fitness predicted cognition or wellbeing.
What they found
Longer-term participants ran further on the shuttle test than both non-participants and shorter-term participants, though the effects were small. There were no meaningful differences in inhibition, verbal working memory or wellbeing, and longer-term participants actually did very slightly worse on the visual-spatial working-memory task. Fitness did not predict working memory or wellbeing overall; only in the shorter-term group did fitter pupils show somewhat better visual-spatial working memory.
The limits
What it doesn't show
Because pupils were not randomly assigned and were measured only once, the groups may differ in other ways; schools may have adopted the programme precisely because pupils were less fit. The exact duration of participation was unknown, habitual physical activity outside school was not measured, and some data were collected just after the summer holidays. Teachers and pupils ran the fitness test themselves, so its measurement fidelity is uncertain, and most schools were in less deprived areas.
Key terms
- The Daily Mile
- A school programme in which pupils run or walk outdoors for about 15 minutes during lesson time on most school days.
- Fitness-cognition hypothesis
- The idea that physical activity improves thinking skills by raising cardiovascular fitness.
- Visual-spatial working memory
- Holding and updating information about locations over a short period, here searching boxes for hidden faces.
- Stop-signal task
- A test of inhibition in which participants must cancel a planned button press when a signal appears.
- Citizen science
- Research in which members of the public, here teachers and pupils, collect the data.
- Eta-squared
- An effect size showing the share of variance in an outcome explained by group membership.
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Quiz yourself
What design did this study use?
Common questions
So does The Daily Mile not work?
It seemed to help fitness a little over time, but this study found no lasting cognitive or wellbeing gains; acute benefits right after running were not tested here.
Why were the shorter-term pupils the least fit?
The authors suggest schools might start the programme where they see pupils are unfit, which would make new participants look worse.
Can a sample of thousands still be misleading?
Yes: a big sample makes estimates precise but does not remove confounding from non-random group membership.
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