{"id":504,"date":"2006-08-16T08:59:34","date_gmt":"2006-08-16T08:59:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/08\/16\/how-dumb-are-dumb-jocks\/"},"modified":"2006-08-16T08:59:34","modified_gmt":"2006-08-16T08:59:34","slug":"how-dumb-are-dumb-jocks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/08\/16\/how-dumb-are-dumb-jocks\/","title":{"rendered":"How Dumb Are Dumb Jocks?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at Cognitive Daily, Dave Munger post about research into the effect of athletics on academics<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Achievement can be measured in many ways — grades, homework, attendance, standardized test scores, and enrollment in college. In all of these areas except standardized test scores, even after controlling for economic status, race, and other background variables, athletic participation was significantly correlated to academic achievement. Even after controlling for academic success in 8th and 10th grade, athletic participation was still associated with positive academic outcomes in 13 out of 21 measures in 12th grade and 2 years out of high school. This suggests that athletic participation itself may be responsible for some academic achievement — the later achievement isn’t completely explained by earlier academic success.<\/p>\n

But what if a student is overcommitted — if he or she participates too heavily in sports, won’t grades suffer? Not according to Marsh and Kleitman’s data: only one measure, number of college applications submitted, was negatively associated with extremely high athletic participation.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Anecdotally, I can say that my experience agrees with this. When I was an undergraduate, I did significantly better during<\/strong> rugby season than before or after the season. (Continued below the fold.) <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This might seem surprising (particularly to those who knew me in college), given the amount of drinking that was associated with playing rugby, but the explanation is simple: playing rugby imposed some more structure on my week. I knew that I had practice from 4-7 on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, beer practice (long story) at 6-ish on Friday, and games on Saturday. With those times blocked out, I had<\/strong> to get work done during the remaining open bits in my schedule. When the season ended, I suddenly had all this extra free time, and it became a convenient excuse for procrastination, which spilled over into the times that I had previously used to do work.<\/p>\n

(The same was true, to a lesser extent, in high school, where like most college-bound students, I did lots of stuff outside of classes, including playing three sports. The “to a lesser extent” is because the work was generally less of a challenge, and disposed of more quickly.)<\/p>\n

In a similar vein, the absolute worst semester I had as a student was freshman year, when I managed to schedule all my classes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I barely got out of bed, and certainly didn’t get any work done. I never made that<\/strong> mistake again.<\/p>\n

So, I can easily believe that there’s a positive correlation between atheltics and academics, just because of the extra discipline enforced by committing to a sport. As to the question Dave raises of why, given this correlation, we still speak of “dumb jocks,” I favor the definitional explanation put forth by the commenters– “jocks” are a sub-set of athletes, and by definition are the ones who aren’t interested in academic pursuits. Somebody who plays sports but still gets good grades isn’t usually termed a “jock”– they fall into some other category.<\/p>\n

This also brings up an interesting point regarding the stereotyping of different sports. Back when I was in high school, the general image was that the smart kids played soccer, while the dumb kids played football. And yet, if you look closely at the games, football actually requires a good deal more active intellectual engagement– you need to know lots of set plays, and have specific responsibilities in many different circumstances. Soccer, on the other hand, is more fluid and instinctive– there are a handful of basic things you need to know how to do, and then you go play.<\/p>\n

And yet, the stereotype of football players as dumber than soccer players is remarkably robust. It’s sort of strange.<\/p>\n

(For the record, I played soccer in high school. I never played organized football, because the football coach when I was in junior high, when I would’ve needed to start playing, was an ass. By the time I was in high school, he was replaced by a much more reasonable guy, who I probably wouldn’t’ve minded playing for, but I was already a soccer player at that point.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at Cognitive Daily, Dave Munger post about research into the effect of athletics on academics: Achievement can be measured in many ways — grades, homework, attendance, standardized test scores, and enrollment in college. In all of these areas except standardized test scores, even after controlling for economic status, race, and other background variables, athletic… Continue reading How Dumb Are Dumb Jocks?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=504"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}