Parents and teachers often urge students to stop jiggling their legs or tapping their fingers. Children with ADHD (Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder) find it especially challenging to sit still and focus. Often, we exhort these kids to “Focus!” Why?

Well, because we feel that if children are moving all around, they’re not paying attention.  Researchers are questioning this assumption.  In fact, they are finding that moving around can help kids focus.  And not just kids with ADHD — all kids!

Mark Rapport and his fellow researchers studied two groups of boys, one with ADHD the other a control group. Rapport then carefully measured arm and leg movements of boys in both groups as they performed an activity that did not require working memory and two activities that did.

In all of the tasks, boys with ADHD were more physically active than the control children. However, both groups showed the same pattern when it came to performing tasks that challenged working memory. Relative to their level of activity in using Microsoft Paint [an activity not requiring working memory], both groups displayed more than a two-fold increase in hyperactivity during the memory tasks. They fidgeted more and often swiveled around in their chairs.

An article in Ars Technica reporting on this research concludes, “Thus, it might be counterproductive to tell children to stop fidgeting when they’re doing tasks that require a lot of focus, provided that their actions aren’t destructive.”

Download the research article [pdf].  The FidgetToFocus blog also discusses the role of movement in ADD/ADHD.