At Lilycroft Primary school in Bradford, you’re just as likely to find a nine-year-old playing with construction equipment toys as you are a child in the Reception or Year 1 classes. Throughout their time at Lilycroft, children have regular ball-catching and throwing sessions. They’re encouraged to use role play and have hands-on lessons. And the school has recently remodelled its Reception, indoor and outdoor areas with a focus on developing pupils’ motor skills.

The reason? It is hoped that through making these adjustments, children’s maths learning and attainment will be improved. And there’s a good chance it will work: the school has made the shift because of a study it took part in last year that found certain motor skills were strongly associated with maths ability (Giles et al, 2018).

Dr Liam Hill, a lecturer in developmental psychology at the University of Leeds, was one of the researchers behind the observational study, which involved 309 children aged 4-11 at the school.

“We looked at the children’s nationally standardised maths attainment scores, along with reading and writing scores, and how they related to different aspects of their motor skills,” explains Hill. “The motor skills generally related to all types of academic performance, but one particular motor skill was most relevant for maths and that is interceptive timing.

“This is essentially your ability to judge an object moving through space and time and then control your own movement to intercept that object. It could be hitting a tennis ball with a racket or catching a ball from another individual. After controlling for other factors, interceptive timing was strongly related to mathematical performance.”

For the study, children completed a computer-based task that involved moving a joystick, the position of which was represented on screen by a rectangular “bat”. A dot moved across the screen and the child had to move the bat to collide with the dot at a specific point - so the same principle as physically hitting a ball with a bat.

Space and time

“This motor skill requires a very good level of understanding of time and space. You have to put yourself in the right space at the right time to intercept that object,” says Hill.

What Hill and his colleagues found is that children’s interceptive timing skills tended to predict their attainment in maths - those who were good at the task were, on average, about five and a half months ahead of classmates who did less well at the task. But success at interceptive timing didn’t influence reading and writing development, so why the maths connection?

“Some of the areas of the brain that we know are associated with numeracy and maths abilities are also strongly associated with understanding space and time,” says Hill. “One of the best ways to understand space and time is to learn to control your movements and to build internal models for moving your body in space and time. And this is also very important in maths where you’re talking about very abstract properties and the relationships between those properties.”

Agile approach

Hill stresses that the study is observational and that he and his colleagues didn’t see direct cause and effect. “Ultimately, we found associations between motor skills and academic performance. What we didn’t do is train up motor skills and see direct improvements in academic performance.”

However, this research feeds into and supports a broader body of work around the incorporation of movement into learning. Hill has previously researched the value of classroom movement breaks, which, he says, “have short-term gains in classroom attention”. But what this research supports is a different viewpoint: rather than squeezing little bits of physical activity into the school day around traditional lessons, we should take a more holistic approach by teaching concepts through movement.

“Physical activity in problem-solving activities can help with getting a handle on difficult concepts,” Hill says. “A physical representation of a problem can help you get a deeper understanding of what can be an abstract challenge.

“If I have liquid in a short, fat jug and I pour it into a long, thin jug, students - particularly younger students - will often think there’s now more water in the taller, thinner jug than in the previous one. But if you allow the students to pour the water themselves, they’re much more likely to recognise that it’s the same quantity of water. Physically interacting with a problem helps you build a clearer abstract understanding of it.”

With pressure on schools to play their part in fighting the childhood obesity crisis, Hill believes that a more agile learning environment could be a two-pronged solution to upping children’s physical activity and improving learning outcomes.

“From a developmental perspective, there is a lot to be gained from understanding movement and motor control, and bringing some of those concepts back into education,” he says. “As you get further along into learning - particularly as you get into primary, and certainly secondary school - the traditional classroom has you sitting there, abstractly thinking about what the teacher is talking about. Might movement be a way, particularly for children who may have attention problems or special educational needs, to complement the curriculum?

“It’s not to say that traditional approaches don’t work - they clearly do and have done for centuries - but there might be advantages to expanding the repertoire.”

Hill gives the example of playing tag rugby to teach maths and English - with colleagues, he is currently evaluating such active learning games offered by a company called Tagtiv8.

“The players collect tags from different buckets,” he explains. “One bucket will have, say, mathematics operations, such as a plus sign, a divide sign. Other buckets contain numbers. And as the children move around, they use the tags to create equations. Or it can be used for geography. Students might move to different parts of the classroom to convey different countries.”

Never too late

While the early years are crucial for developing children’s motor skills, Hill says it’s never too late to fine-tune them - and schools need to be a part of that.

“The view that motor skills are not curricularly relevant, or that they’re something that should have been handled before school or outside the curriculum, is changing,” he adds. “When children reach primary school, if they don’t have good fundamental movement skills, then it increasingly becomes a disadvantage in developing more advanced cognitive skills. Because not only do they not have the tools to help grasp concepts but just being able to perform some of those motor actions is requiring much more of their attention, so they don’t have the attention to focus on numeracy or literacy.”

Hill stresses that movement isn’t a magic bullet for straight As in maths or, indeed, any other subject. What he would like to see, though, is a better grasp of the research that suggests movement can at least help.

“I don’t want to imply that movement is some sort of magic, that we’re going to boost learning through physical activity and not actually teaching the content. But movement is part of children’s toolbox, so let’s take advantage of it,” he says.

Christina Quaine is a freelance writer

This article originally appeared in the 28 June 2019 issue under the headline “Tes focus on… Physical learning”