Development
How motor skills relate to school success in children
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Children with better hand-eye coordination performed better on academic tests and tasks requiring visual-spatial skills, while agility showed no such relationship.
How this study connects
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Physical exercise, motor coordination tasks, and structured yoga routines are linked to improved executive control, visual attention, and cognitive flexibility in children and adolescents.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Hand-eye coordination and agility vs school tests and visual-attention tasks
- N
- N=45 · Children 8–14 years at a municipal school in Rio de Janeiro; 57.8% girls
- Population
- Literate 8–14-year-olds in a Rio de Janeiro municipal school with high educational lag
- Outcome
- Academic test scores and visual-motor/attention performance predicted by hand-eye coordination, not agility or BMI
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How motor skills relate to school success in children
These passages occur verbatim in the stored paper text. They support the points listed below; they do not verify every statement in the explanation.
45 children participated in the study
The sample of this cross-sectional study consisted of 45 children from 8 to 14 years of age, literate, of both sexes, from the municipal school Compositor Luiz Gonzaga, located in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Motor coordination predicted school performance with an R-squared of 0.20
The results showed that TTD is the best predictor of positive results in school performance ( R 2 = 0.20).
Key findings
The study revealed that hand-eye coordination was the single best predictor of academic success, accounting for an R-squared variance of 0.20 in overall school test scores. Children who completed the hand-eye coordination task faster also scored significantly higher on cognitive tests requiring visual-motor integration and selective attention. In contrast, physical agility and body mass index showed no statistically significant relationship with either cognitive performance or academic success.
Methodology
Researchers evaluated 45 children aged 8 to 14 from a municipal school in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. They measured the participants' physical characteristics, hand-eye motor coordination using a disc touch test, and physical agility using a shuttle run test. The children also completed a standard academic achievement test along with a battery of cognitive assessments that measured attention, memory, and executive functions.
Limitations
Because this study is cross-sectional, it cannot prove that training a child's motor coordination directly causes their grades or cognitive skills to improve. The sample size was relatively small with only 45 participants recruited from a single school with high rates of academic delay, which limits how easily these findings can be generalized to other populations. Additionally, the study did not control for physical maturation and pubertal development across the wide age range of 8 to 14 years.
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