What she saw in Finland was especially “eye opening” — a recognition of the value of play in a child’s educational journey. The schools she visited enjoyed a 15-minute break for exercise or physical play for every 45 minutes of instruction time.

“I thought, how can I replicate that here? We don’t do enough of it.”

“We’ve really worked hard, especially at the K-5 level, to bring kids outdoors as much as possible,” said Sinha, who in years past has directed funding to develop multiple outdoor classroom spaces across the district’s five elementary school buildings. Educators are encouraged to incorporate movement breaks into snacktime, and they recently fenced the schoolyard around the middle school so that older students can enjoy a recess and be more active.

But when it comes to boosting physical activity, any significant alteration to the daily schedule comes with a cost: precious lost minutes required for core academic classes. 

“I do think if kids had that extra physical activity, we’d need to teach less,” Sinha said. “It’s weird to say, but I think they retain more when they have more opportunities to be active.”

She’s not wrong.

New from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, shows that when students engage in high-intensity interval exercises, they score significantly higher on standardized tests measuring verbal comprehension. In a study of elementary school children aged 9 to 12, researchers examined a type of brain neuroelectrical activity called “error-related negativity,” which occurs when people make a mistake and is associated with reduced focus and performance. What they found is that after acute exercise, the error-related activity decreased significantly.

“We have to be aware of our child’s health, and if we want them to succeed academically and mental health-wise, exercise is something that needs to be in the forefront,” says Eric Drollette, the study’s lead author and a professor at UNC. “Yes, it helps with their physical health, but we can’t forget the brain part of it. The benefits of exercise can be influential in an [educational] environment .”

Drollette had a pretty good idea that the experiment would reveal some type of positive relationship between exercise and academics. After all, research has long borne out the benefits of physical exercise on the mental health and general wellness of adults and children alike. One of Drollette’s own previous involving college students who underwent high-intensity interval training showed improved brain function and cognition. 

But having three children of his own, he knew anecdotally that any type of prolonged high-intensity activity, like running on a treadmill or using other types of exercise equipment, just wasn’t feasible for younger children. Not only, he suspected, would they get bored or lack motivation to complete the exercise, but it also wasn’t a scenario that educators could easily replicate in their own classrooms. 

The goal instead was to design a fitness regimen that would hold student interest and could be performed in the classroom without taking up too much time. What he came up with was a series of stationary exercises – think high knees, jumping jacks, lunges and squats — performed one after another, alternating between 30 seconds on and 30 seconds off for nine minutes total. 

“This is more natural for a kid’s type of exercise,” he said. “I wanted to make sure that if a teacher reads this, or if the public reads this, they can say, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s something that’s possible to do in the classroom.’”

What ended up surprising Drollette, he said, was how selective the benefits were for certain academic achievements — most notably, for word recognition and fluency, which include reading and word processing — and much less for math. Another surprising result? The children didn’t realize they were exercising as hard as they actually were, suggesting, Drollette said, that they truly enjoyed the movement break.

The study comes against the backdrop of schools recess and physical education classes in order to prioritize instructional time and boost academic achievement — especially in the wake of the pandemic, which wrought steep learning loss. According to the , children should get four 15-minute recesses every day. While more than of the country’s elementary schools incorporate regularly scheduled recess into each school day, on average students receive just 27 minutes. 

As it stands, only require schools to offer a daily recess, and most districts don’t have a formal recess policy. Since the mid-2000s, up to 40 percent of school districts have reduced or cut recess. Moreover, some districts still allow educators to take away recess as a punishment, which experts say does more harm than good.

While Drollette acknowledges that the main focus of schools is academics — not movement — the practice of shortening recess and physical education, he says, is short sighted. 

“As a nation, we’ve really struggled to recover loss in physical activity since the pandemic,” he says. “If we keep removing physical activity, we may be hampering mental health as well as cognitive function. And then if kids are performing poorly cognitively, they’re not doing well with academics, causing schools to keep pushing academics. And so my approach is that we may need to flip the other direction. We need to focus on physical movement for a better healthy mind in order for kids to do well in school.”

This summer, the Trump administration appeared to recognize as much, issuing an establishing a President’s Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition, as well as reinstating the Presidential Fitness Test — the latter of which harkens back to back to the 1950s under President Dwight D. Eisenhower but was phased out in 2013.

“For far too long, the physical and mental health of the American people has been neglected.  Rates of obesity, chronic disease, inactivity, and poor nutrition are at crisis levels, particularly among our children,” the order reads. “These trends weaken our economy, military readiness, academic performance, and national morale.”

It’s unclear what the new regimen will look like, but the original test required students to compete in their schools and nationally by completing circuits of pushups, pullups, situps and the mile run, among other exercises. Notably, the test was retired under the Obama administration in exchange for the “Presidential Youth Fitness Program,” which focused more holistically on student health and less on the competitive test.

Starting this school year, one thing is certain: School district leaders like Sinha and classroom educators will continue to be hard-pressed to inject more time for physical activity into the day due to time requirements for core academic subjects.

“Physical activity is more important than ever before for our students,” she says, noting that students in Finland traditionally score at the top on the international benchmark assessments known as — far above students in the U.S. “It’s always been important, but kids are different today, and they need to be moving their little bodies around.”

I wondered how countries outside the U.S. are dealing with these shockwaves, how they are employing AI more broadly to improve education and what lessons American schools can learn from their approaches.

I found that other developed countries share concerns about students cheating but are moving quickly to use AI to personalize education, enhance language lessons and help teachers with mundane tasks, such as grading. Some of these countries are in the early stages of training teachers to use AI and developing curriculum standards for what students should know and be able to do with the technology.

Several countries began positioning themselves several years ago to invest in AI in education in order to compete in the fourth industrial revolution. 

ł§žą˛Ô˛ľ˛šąč´Ç°ůąđ’s “Smart Nation” , for example, aims to position the country as a world leader in AI by 2030 by bringing together researchers, government and industry. One goal is to help teachers better customize and improve education for every student, particularly those with special needs. An AI-enabled will provide customized feedback and motivation to students, automated grading and machine learning systems to identify how each student responds to classroom materials and activities.

One of the most promising applications of generative AI in education is the ability to tailor learning to individual students’ needs, and there is a clear trend toward customization in other countries’ educational strategies. 

South Korea has implemented AI-based systems to adapt homework and assignments based on students’ educational levels and “.” Each child will have a personalized AI tutor and access to an online learning platform, allowing teachers to focus on social-emotional and hands-on lessons. The minister of education says these changes are necessary to allow public schools, which currently emphasize memorization, to provide the same type of personalized and deeper learning that private schools offer. He foresees a future where assessments happen throughout the normal course of daily assignments rather than in an end-of-course exam. 

In India, ed tech company uses AI to clarify complex math and science concepts. Students can use a smartphone to scan a passage from a textbook, and the app uses 3-D imagery to help with visualization. AI is also being used in India to predict student performance, enabling early intervention. 

Countries are also investing heavily in AI teacher preparation programs and national curricular requirements. Singapore recently announced a national initiative to build AI literacy among students and teachers to ensure they understand the risks and benefits of the technology. By 2026, training on AI in education for teachers at all levels, including those in training.

South Korea is investing heavily in . By 2025, the country aims to have AI coursework in its national curriculum across all grade levels, starting with high school. The Korean ministry of education’s unit is designing and piloting extensive teacher development around AI and other technologies. The ministry’s Center provides model classrooms where visitors can experience the use of advanced technologies in education. 

Finland, long admired for its high-quality education system and teacher-centric system, has embraced AI with a bold national commitment to educate its citizens with free online coursework. Roughly half of schools use the platform to give students and teachers immediate feedback and analytics on student assignments.

In China, the government has — via tax breaks and other incentives — in tools, such as the adaptive tutoring platform AI, which rely on large-scale data sets and camera surveillance. Most of these products focus heavily on improving performance on standardized tests, so students whose families can afford it get ahead. In countries like China, ethics, equitable access, privacy and other concerns are not high priorities, however.

In contrast, Finland’s , a collaboration among a multi-disciplinary group of international researchers and companies, aims to promote equity and quality of learning locally and globally. The project has produced a number of on the of AI in education and on how these technologies can improve teaching and learning. Its members are designing and testing an intelligent digital system that assesses student wellness and feeds back insights to students and educators.

Evidence matters a lot right now, and many of these countries are investing in research to inform the effective use of new tools as well as to guide regulatory efforts. A research center, , hosted by AI Singapore and funded by the Smart Nation and Digital Government Office, works with the Ministry of Education to launch projects that will improve the education system. As part of a five-year plan called AI@NIE, ł§žą˛Ô˛ľ˛šąč´Ç°ůąđ’s National Institute of Education will invest in research and innovation to use artificial intelligence for education.

Early guidelines are in the works, in the U.S., but they are coming late. Though the Department of Education recently released a strong , and the American Federation of Teachers put out an , the European Union issued guidelines two years ago and recently updated their proposed . Japan recently released and has selected a number of schools to pilot them as the government weighs which regulations make most sense.

The U.S. government could start by adding considerations for the use of AI to its , such as how states and districts should best minimize risks and maximize opportunities. Providing direction about how best to prepare teachers and students for the coming tsunami would help connect the dots to a broader strategy to make U.S. students prepared and competitive in the AI economy. 

The push other countries are making toward radically customized education is also one the U.S. should take seriously. Too many education policy people dismiss personalized learning as a remnant of a effort in the early 2000s, but other countries see that high-quality curriculum can be leveraged by AI in revolutionary ways and can be tailored in real time to a student’s particular level. 

It’s time to up our game on this front and embrace AI-enabled personalized learning like , in part by investing in a national research agenda in partnership with companies to learn whether and how AI can accelerate learning. Finally, we owe it to teachers and districts to offer a comprehensive AI training program ASAP. This is too important a support to be left to schools, districts or even states to figure out. 

As the U.S. continues to explore the potential of generative artificial intelligence in education, the federal government and states must accelerate efforts to compete and thrive in an AI-powered world. It will also behoove education leaders, researchers and technology developers, however, to collaborate and share best practices and policies to unlock new frontiers in education and equip students with the skills and knowledge needed for success in an increasingly complex world.