A recent study has shown that having dogs in primary school classrooms will relieve stress for the students there better than relaxation sessions will.
Stress is known to negatively impact most people’s behavior, learning, wellbeing, and health. This research is crucial to schools because when there is less stress on a student, they will perform better, be more active, and overall be healthier.
Kerstin Meints, a researcher from the University of Lincoln, performed and published the results of the experiment that she and her team of other researchers conducted in the scientific journal Plos One.
They studied 205 8-and 9-year-olds in mainstream schools and 44 more children in special needs schools. They put the children in 3 groups— the first one spent time with trained dogs and their trainer, the second group spent time doing meditation and relaxation sessions, and a “control group,” or the last group, did not do either of those things.
The way they studied the children’s stress levels was by looking at how much cortisol (a kind of stress hormone) was in their saliva. It turns out that spending 20 minutes with a dog twice a week relieves stress better than meditation. The benefits were also similar for both special needs schools and mainstream schools.
The group of children who were with the dog had way less cortisol present than the ones in the other two groups, while the other two groups of children had an increase in cortisol. The researchers also found that the children’s stress was lowest immediately after they finished their sessions with the dogs.
Now that researchers know what can deplete stress levels in students, they say they will still need to do more research to find the ideal amount of time a child should spend with dogs, to relieve more stress in primary schools all around the world.
Stress is known to negatively impact most people’s behavior, learning, wellbeing, and health. This research is crucial to schools because when there is less stress on a student, they will perform better, be more active, and overall be healthier.
Kerstin Meints, a researcher from the University of Lincoln, performed and published the results of the experiment that she and her team of other researchers conducted in the scientific journal Plos One.
They studied 205 8-and 9-year-olds in mainstream schools and 44 more children in special needs schools. They put the children in 3 groups— the first one spent time with trained dogs and their trainer, the second group spent time doing meditation and relaxation sessions, and a “control group,” or the last group, did not do either of those things.
The way they studied the children’s stress levels was by looking at how much cortisol (a kind of stress hormone) was in their saliva. It turns out that spending 20 minutes with a dog twice a week relieves stress better than meditation. The benefits were also similar for both special needs schools and mainstream schools.
The group of children who were with the dog had way less cortisol present than the ones in the other two groups, while the other two groups of children had an increase in cortisol. The researchers also found that the children’s stress was lowest immediately after they finished their sessions with the dogs.
Now that researchers know what can deplete stress levels in students, they say they will still need to do more research to find the ideal amount of time a child should spend with dogs, to relieve more stress in primary schools all around the world.
