Leg swinging, tapping feet, and moving chairs help children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) to remember information and figure out complex cognitive tasks, says a study by the University of Central Florida. The study was announced on April 17, 2015, and was published online in the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology.

Researchers say current, long-time methods for helping children with ADHD may be “misguided.” The typical interventions target reducing hyperactivity are "exactly the opposite of what we should be doing for a majority of children with ADHD,” said one of the authors, Mark Rapport, the head of the Children’s Learning Clinic at the University of Central Florida. “The message isn’t ‘Let them run around the room,’ but you need to be able to facilitate their movement so they can maintain the level of alertness necessary for cognitive activities.”

Rapport’s previous research showed that the excessive movement of hyperactive children is not always present as previously thought. Movement actually appears when children use the executive functions of the brain, especially their working memory and appears to serve a purpose. “What we’ve found is that when they’re moving the most, the majority of them perform better,” Rapport said. “They have to move to maintain alertness.” The opposite was true of children without ADHD who performed worse after moving during the cognitive tests.

There were 52 participants on the study who were boys ages 8 to 12, with 29 children diagnosed with ADHD and 23 others who showed normal development and did not have any clinical disorders. The participants were asked to perform a series of standardized tests that measured their working memory, the brain function that temporarily stores and manages information that is used to carry out complex tasks such as learning, comprehension, and reasoning.

The children watched a series of jumbled numbers and a letter flash onto a computer screen and then put the numbers in order, followed by the letter. Observers recorded the children’s movements and gauged their attention level. The study findings suggest that most students with ADHD could perform better academically in homework, classwork, and tests if they can engage in an activity such as exercise bikes or sitting on activity balls.