Dr Kawashima's Brain Training

Three P6 classes in schools from similar socio-economic catchment areas in Dundee were identified to participate in this project.

Before any work was done with the schools they were all given a written numeracy test aimed at Level D of 5-14. This involved mental addition and subtraction within 100 as well as multiplication and division sums, up to the 11-times table.

The children were timed doing this test and they were not informed about how they performed. They were also given the Burnett self-concept questionnaire to determine how they perceived themselves as learners.

The treatment was then as follows:

• School A: the school was given 30 Nintendo DS consoles and 30 copies of Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training. The children were only allowed to play the game for 15 to 20 minutes first thing in the morning. They were then allowed to do what is called the Brain Age Check once on a Friday afternoon. This was to go on for 10 weeks.
• School B: the class from this school had been introduced to Brain Gym earlier in their school career although it had not played a significant part in their time in P6 up to that point. The class teacher agreed to make Brain Gym an integral part of the daily routine, as far as possible, for the duration of the 10-week Nintendo trial. He wanted to use it before or during maths time but was adamant that he would use it where and when he felt its use or necessity was most appropriate. Three Brain Gym movements (Brain Buttons, The Cross Crawl and Hook-Ups) were used in each of 23 days out of the ten-week programme and a further movement called Lazy 8s was used on only five days in the 10 weeks.
• School C: this school acted as the control group. It had no access to the DS game and did not use Brain Gym as an integral part of any class routine.

In terms of supporting School A, we spent one morning helping the children familiarise themselves with the Nintendo DS and setting up their player data file. This proved to be the only onerous aspect of the project. Once this was done it was over to the class teacher and the pupils to run with it.

Although we were interested in the mental maths aspect of the game we did not communicate this to the children and we made it clear that we wanted them to engage with all the games once a day.

We returned to the three schools after the 10-week treatment period and gave them the same maths test and self-concept questionnaire. Times and scores were again noted and then we had a look at what we had found.