Childhood obesity and academic performance among elementary public school children

ABSTRACT

Background: In addition to health problems or increasing the significant risk of health problems, obesity is also negatively associated with several socioeconomic outcomes. Obesity could negatively influence academic outcomes. The relationship between obesity rates and academic performance deserves attention because obesity rates have been steadily increasing over the last few decades.

Purpose: Most of the existing studies assess the effect of student obesity on the student’s own educational outcomes. In this study, we examine the relationship in the context of obesity at the student grade level, which allows us to partially examine the influence of stigmatisation.

Design & methods: The main variables of interest are obesity rates and academic proficiency rates. We study public school students, grades kindergarten (K) through to 12, in Arkansas. Multilevel methods are employed to account for similar factors at various levels in the school hierarchy, i.e., at the grade-, school- and school district-level.

Results: Obesity prevalence is positively associated with the percentage of students performing below proficiency levels in both literacy and maths. Our findings also suggest that stigmatisation experienced by obese children may be one mechanism behind this association.

Conclusions: The findings favour the hypothesis that obese students could face greater psychological consequences in school settings with a smaller percentage of obese students and vice versa.

KEYWORDS:

• Childhood obesity
• educational economics
• health
• human capital
• academic performance
• stigmatisation

Acknowledgments

Authors thank seminar participants in the University of Arkansas for helpful comments; the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement (ACHI) for the obesity data; and Diana Danforth for assistance with data organisation and management. Thanks are due to Qiuqiong Huang for giving suggestions for improving this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Grade retention refers to students being retained in the same grade or repeating the same grade.

2. For more info, please visit: http://www.arkansased.gov/divisions/learning-services/assessment/definitions-of-common-terms.

3. Walt test produced an F-test statistic of 2.34 (p-value = 0.097) and 2.03 (p-value = 0.132) for per cent below proficiency levels in maths and literacy, respectively.

Additional information

Funding

Funding Sources: This project was supported by Agriculture and Food Research Initiative Competitive Grant no. 2011-68001-30014 from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture This work was also partly funded by the National Research Foundation of Korea [NRF-2011-330-B00074] and the Arkansas Biosciences Institute (ABI).