How Physical Education Improve Adolescents Cognitive Level
Physical education is one of the most discussed topics in the education section. Physical Education (PE) develops the skills, knowledge, values and attitudes needed for establishing and enjoying an active and healthy lifestyle, as well as building student confidence and competence in facing challenges as individuals and in groups or teams, through a wide range of learning activities. PE is offered as an elective examination subject at senior secondary education level. It emphasizes the connection between theory and practical skills and is designed to develop the interest and potential of students in the areas of PE and sports. It will help students gain a deeper understanding of theories and applications in the fields of human movement and health, and it will promote the well-being of individuals and society. There are several research topics on physical education and how they can improve level of cognition among adolescents. This is the major reason for this article
PHYSICAL EDUCATION
Physical education is a process through which favourable adaptation and learning (organic, neuromuscular, intellectual, social, cultural, emotional, and aesthetic) result from and proceed through, fairly vigorous activity. Since the crises that emerged in physical education during the 1960s and 1970s, and the growing disconnect between the scientists and practitioners, the pedagogical subdiscipline of physical education has been too isolated from the academic dialogue about the aims of the field which led to continuous research on physical education.
In most tertiary institutions today under the department of education we tend to see more undergraduate project topics centered on physical education. As a result, pedagogy professionals and practitioners have been unable to assume their rightful responsibility of advocating for and defining the nature of the field at the school level. This also includes taking the lead in educating parents, administrators, faculty, and staff and final year project students about physical education class, its curriculum, designed outcomes, and benefits
COGNITION
Theories are often said to “carve nature at its joints.” In the case of psychological theories, the entity being carved is the human mind. The term cognition is used to refer to those aspects of the mind related to the acquisition, modification, and manipulation of knowledge in particular contexts. Knowledge comes in many forms (e.g., math knowledge, self-knowledge), so the field of cognitive development has broad applicability. In fact, it is hard to think of a situation in which knowledge would not be involved. Nevertheless, when we say that researchers study cognitive development, we usually mean that they study such things as learning, memory, language, and reasoning. More specifically, cognitivists make several important distinctions or “carvings” in their theorizing. The first is the distinction between behaviors (e.g., walking to a library) and mental entities that cause these behaviors (e.g., the desire to read a certain book and the belief it can be found in the library). Other important distinctions pertain to the different kinds of mental entities that have been proposed to explain various kinds of behaviors. At the highest level of analysis, three kinds of mental entities have been proposed: (a) knowledge, (b) cognitive processes and capacities, and © metacognitive orientations. Cognition is widely considered a huge determinants for the academic performance of students in secondary and tertiary institutions.
ADOLESENTS COGNITIVE LEVEL
Having defined cognition in terms of knowledge, cognitive processes, constraints, and metacognitive orientations, we can now consider age changes in these aspects of mind. Before proceeding, however, it is important to clarify how the term development is used in this chapter. The present author shares the view that cognition can be said to develop when (a) either a qualitative or quantitative change occurs in some aspect of cognition over time and (b) this change enhances an individual’s ability to attain healthy or adaptive outcomes (e.g., better grades in school; stronger, more beneficial friendships; physical or emotional health). Note that such changes can either be local (i.e., confined to a particular domain) or global (i.e., domain-general or stage-like). A second introductory point is that the vast majority of contemporary cognitive developmentalists strongly support the idea of domain-specificity. What children learn is obviously a function of what they are exposed to. If children grapple with certain topics more often than others in school and elsewhere, it stands to reason that their knowledge of the high-exposure topics will be more extensive, interconnected, and abstract than their knowledge of lesser-exposure topics (even a domain-general theorist such as Piaget would agree with such an assertion. This analysis suggests that older adolescents and adults would only tend to know more than younger adolescents for topics that are repeatedly expanded upon with age.
PHYSICAL EDUCATION AND ADOLESCENTS COGNITIVE LEVEL
It is widely understood that regular physical activity in adolescence offers numerous health benefits. However, despite the broad dissemination of health information about the benefits of regular participation in physical activity, many studies have found that the majority of adolescents around the world either engage in physical activity on an infrequent basis or are completely sedentary. It is well known how important physical activity is in creating the favorable conditions for the human mental activity implementation. It serves as a means of remoting the negative emotional impacts and intellectual exhaustion, and therefore as the factor of intellectual activity stimulation. As a result of physical exercises, we see the improvement of the brain blood circulation and the intensification of psychological processes providing perception, processing and reproduction of the information. Thus, the numerous data show that the physical exercises influence on the increasing of memory size and attention span, accelerating the solution of the basic intellectual tasks and hastening the vision and motor reactions. It should be noted that in spite of its great independent value, the mental processes activation is not among the courses, which are promoted by the various theories of the physical education. However, it is particularly important for the physical education classes at school, where pupils` mental exhaustion is often observed. Therefore, the pupils` activation of mental processes and preparation of nervous system for the active functioning in the further classes is, definitely, a priority.
