Researcher Highlights
Think and Move

Nick Riley believes integrating physical activity into core school subjects can improve not only students' health but their behaviour and their academic performance.

"There are lot of health benefits that come from increased activity and there is a lot of research that suggests that active children actually have the potential to perform better academically," Dr Riley says.

Dr Riley, who trained in physical education but spent 14 years as a classroom teacher in primary schools in the North of England, has developed a program called “Thinking While Moving” in partnership with the NSW DoE School Sport Unit.

The program integrates physical activity into everyday maths and English lessons. Dr Riley has already completed four RCT’s with local schools and the research has consistently demonstrated improved on task behaviour and enhanced academic outcomes as well as enhancing levels of school-based physical activity.

Dr Riley believes high quality professional learning helps teachers to continuously improve and maintain their teaching practice and develop their careers. Therefore, he has subsequently trained over 700 teachers from over 400 NSW schools in TWM via accredited teacher professional learning and the School sport Unit website hosts a series of videos and lesson plans for teachers. “ As these traditional face to face professional development offerings for teachers have been impacted by  COVID 19 (school closures, restrictions to travel etc.) teachers have had to turn to the online delivery of professional learning for support and therefore it has been crucial that providers of such learning transition to a more flexible delivery style, Recently over 1500 teachers have completed a recently designed  online version of Thinking while Moving via the MyPL platform available to teachers in NSW”.

"I believe all kids have huge potential and as educators and teachers we have to find the key to unlock that potential. For some student’s movement-based learning is that key ".

Pre-service teachers may hold the key

Schools provide an ideal setting for physical activity interventions to help children move more. However, for the next stage of Dr Riley’s research instead of targeting current teachers, Dr Riley will focus on pre-service teachers. He is working in partnership with academics from Deakin University in Melbourne to increase knowledge about the importance of children in school being active and sitting less as part of the Transform Ed study.

Best start needed for Kindergarten students

Dr Riley is also leading a study to develop an assessment tool for children’s foundational movement skills. Dr Riley is currently trialling the playground circuit and associated app that will act as a time efficient assessment of children’s foundational movement that will be used by classroom teachers using the Best Start digital app. This will not only act as an assessment tool to inform teachers and create summative reports of student capabilities, but the associated playground markings will then be used as a stimulus to develop lesson plans and ideas that teachers can implement to improve foundational  movement capabilities.

“The NSW Department of Education provides an assessment to ascertain each child’s literacy and numeracy skills at school entry to enable the development of appropriate learning programs and teaching plans moving forwards. So why should we not do this for students’ foundational movement as well?” Dr Riley asks.