The Crucial Role of Recess in School

Abstract:

Recess is at the heart of a vigorous debate over the role of schools in promoting the optimal development of the whole child. A growing trend toward reallocating time in school to accentuate the more academic subjects has put this important facet of a child’s school day at risk. Recess serves as a necessary break from the rigors of concentrated, academic challenges in the classroom. But equally important is the fact that safe and well-supervised recess offers cognitive, social, emotional, and physical benefits that may not be fully appreciated when a decision is made to diminish it. Recess is unique from, and a complement to, physical education—not a substitute for it. The American Academy of Pediatrics believes that recess is a crucial and necessary component of a child’s development and, as such, it should not be withheld for punitive or academic reasons.

The Benefits of Recess for the Whole Child

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines recess as “regularly scheduled periods within the elementary school day for unstructured physical activity and play.”¹ The literature examining the global benefits of recess for a child’s cognitive, emotional, physical, and social well-being has recently been reviewed.² Yet, recent surveys and studies have indicated a trend toward reducing recess to accommodate additional time for academic subjects in addition to its withdrawal for punitive or behavioral reasons.³^–⁶ Furthermore, the period allotted to recess decreases as the child ages and is less abundant among children of lower socioeconomic status and in the urban setting.⁴^,⁷

Just as physical education and physical fitness have well-recognized benefits for personal and academic performance, recess offers its own, unique benefits. Recess represents an essential, planned respite from rigorous cognitive tasks. It affords a time to rest, play, imagine, think, move, and socialize.⁸^–¹¹ After recess, for children or after a corresponding break time for adolescents, students are more attentive and better able to perform cognitively.¹²^–¹⁶ In addition, recess helps young children to develop social skills that are otherwise not acquired in the more structured classroom environment.⁸^,¹¹^,¹⁷

Cognitive/Academic Benefits

Children develop intellectual constructs and cognitive understanding through interactive, manipulative experiences. This type of exploratory experience is a feature of play in an unstructured social environment.⁸^,¹⁸ Optimal cognitive processing in a child necessitates a period of interruption after a period of concentrated instruction.¹⁹^,²⁰ The benefits of these interruptions are best served by unstructured breaks rather than by merely shifting from 1 cognitive task to another to diminish stresses and distractions that interfere with cognitive processing.⁹^,¹¹^,¹⁵^,²⁰ Several studies demonstrated that recess, whether performed indoors or outdoors, made children more attentive and more productive in the classroom.¹¹^–¹³^,¹⁶^,¹⁹^,²¹ This finding was true even though, in many cases, the students spent much of their recess time socializing. In fact, a student’s ability to refocus cognitively was shown to be stimulated more by the break from the classroom than by the mode of activity that occurred during that break; any type of activity at recess benefited cognitive performance afterward.¹⁴ Although specified time afforded for recess diminishes with age, the benefits of periodic breaks in the academic day to optimize cognitive processing applies equally to adolescents and to younger children.

Social and Emotional Benefits

Recess promotes social and emotional learning and development for children by offering them a time to engage in peer interactions in which they practice and role play essential social skills.⁸^,¹⁷^,¹⁸^,²²^,²³ This type of activity, under adult supervision, extends teaching in the classroom to augment the school’s social climate. Through play at recess, children learn valuable communication skills, including negotiation, cooperation, sharing, and problem solving as well as coping skills, such as perseverance and self-control.⁸^–¹¹^,¹⁵^,¹⁷^,²² These skills become fundamental, lifelong personal tools. Recess offers a child a necessary, socially structured means for managing stress. By adapting and adjusting to the complex school environment, children augment and extend their cognitive development in the classroom.¹⁵^,¹⁷

Physical Benefits

There is a wealth of literature published on the need for and benefit of physical activity and fitness, not only for a child’s physical well-being but also for academic and social maturation.⁵^,¹²^,²²^–³³ Although not all children play vigorously at recess, it does provide the opportunity for children to be active in the mode of their choosing and to practice movement and motor skills. Importantly, recess affords young children free activity for the sheer joy of it.³⁴ Even minor movement during recess counterbalances sedentary time at school and at home and helps the child achieve the recommended 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity per day, a standard strongly supported by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) policy, which can help lower risk of obesity.⁵^,¹²^,³⁰^–³⁵

Conclusions

School attendance represents a unique opportunity to address nutrition and physical fitness. Each day, 55 million US students attend school, which constitutes nearly one-half of their wakeful hours.⁴⁷ In light of rising rates of overweight and obesity, schools have come under increased scrutiny. Within the school environment, there are competing calls for stricter standards and greater academic achievement as well as calls for schools to provide greater opportunities for nonsedentary daily activity. Even with ample evidence of a whole-child benefit from recess, significant external pressures, such as standardized cognitive testing mandated by educational reforms, have led some to view recess as time that would be better spent on academics.⁴ Time previously dedicated to daily activity in school, such as physical education and recess, is being reallocated to make way for additional academic instruction.

Ironically, minimizing or eliminating recess may be counterproductive to academic achievement, as a growing body of evidence suggests that recess promotes not only physical health and social development but also cognitive performance.¹⁰^,³⁷ Although recess and physical education both promote activity and a healthy lifestyle, it is only supervised but unstructured recess that offers children the opportunity to actually play creatively. In this sense, then, pediatricians’ support of recess is an extension of the AAP’s policy statement supporting free play as a fundamental component of a child’s normal growth and development.¹⁶ On the basis of an abundance of scientific studies, withholding recess for punitive or academic reasons would seem to be counterproductive to the intended outcomes and may have unintended consequences in relation to a child’s acquisition of important life skills.

ALPHA-PHONICS Blog Editor Note: We have edited out the following sections of this report for brevity: The sections are: Duration and Timing of Recess, Structured Recess, Safety and Supervision, The Emerging Issue of Structured Recess, Recommendations. To see the full text of the article please click here

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