Test Performance And Study Breaks

As the culture of American education changes, recess time is declining in favor of instruction time. An important question, however, is whether this shift is truly going to yield the best learning outcomes. The purpose of the present study is to examine the effect of taking a break, both mental and physical, on test performance. Seventy college students were tested on their learning of a list of phobias that they had studied in one of three conditions: no break, mental break, and physical break. It was predicted that participants would perform better on a subsequent memory task when a break was included, and that a break involving physical activity would produce better results than a mental break alone. The results showed that the mental break condition had significantly higher scores than the control group but that the physical break condition scores were not significantly different from the control group scores.