Effects of using standing desks for 45 minutes on the stress and executive function of elementary school students

Abstract

Studies have presented data regarding the effects of short-term (weeks) and long-term (one year) use of standing desks in classrooms on children's health, cognition, and musculoskeletal symptoms. However, no previous study has examined such effects in an extremely short-term period such as one classroom lesson. This study aimed to examine the effects of using standing desks for 45 minutes on elementary school students' stress and executive function. For this experiment, 56 students were recruited from public elementary schools in Setagayaku, Tokyo, Japan. There were three conditions involving the use of standing desks (standing, sitting, and mixed), and all students performed tasks for 45 minutes in each condition. Measurements of stress and executive function were performed before and after the students engaged with each condition. Stress levels did not differ between the sitting and standing conditions for the full 45 minutes. The number of correct answers in the Stroop test, an interference task, was higher in the standing and mixed conditions (switching between standing and sitting) than in the sitting condition (interaction: F(1,37) = 3.340, p = 0.04, η2 = 0.05). These results indicate that using standing desks for 45 minutes improved the 'inhibition' of executive function without excessively increasing stress levels.

Fig 1. Example of the standing desk used in this research.

Fig 2. Experimental procedure of this study.

Fig 3. Comparison, for each condition, of the changes in stress hormones in saliva before and after performing the 45-minute tasks (n = 18).

Fig 4. Comparison, for each condition, of the number of correct answers for the Stroop test before and after performing the 45-minute tasks (n = 38).

Data from 2017 from the five participants who participated in both data collection periods (2017 and 2018) were not included.