Role of sports participation on attention and concentration among children

Abstract

Sports participation promotes the positive impact on children’s physical and mental health. Sports participation enhances the cognitive functioning like, memory, concentration, behaviour and academic achievement for children. Children who participate in sports have shown improved academic achievement, higher self-esteem, fewer behavioral problems, and healthier psychological adjustment. Physical movement affects the brain’s physiology and is associated with improved attention and better information processing, storage, and retrieval. Studies in the western countries have suggested a positive relationship between sports participation and attention and concentration. However, there are not many studies in this direction in India. It is evident that results from the west cannot be directly applied to Indian context because of cultural skepticism. Keeping above points in view present study try to explore whether participation in sports enhances children attention and concentration. 30 children who are participating in competitive sports and 30 children who are not participating in any kind of competitive sports were selected using convenient sampling technique. Dr. Howard Andrew Knox’s Knox cube imitation test was used to measure the attention and concentration of the children. This study will help to enrich the theoretical understanding of sports participation and Attention and concentration enhancement. The results were discussed in this paper.