Taking a Brain Break

The purpose of the project was to see if giving
students a structured physical activity break after a
lesson and before the intended summative assessment
would increase their scores academically and/
or decrease their test anxiety. The idea was acquired
from spending over 1,000 hours in elementary school
classrooms ranging from kindergarten to fifth grade.
It was observed that after a 30-minute math lesson,
the students were expected to take an assessment
based on the content of the lesson. It seemed as
if students were having a difficult time focusing on
the test and were getting wiggly in their seats. The
students seemed nervous to take a test directly after
instruction and some of the scores were not as high
as intended. This was the basis behind conducting
this research. There had to be a solution to this problem
and the researcher was determined to find one.