[MUSIC] Hello, my name is Niels Egelund, and I am a Professor of Education at Aahus University in Denmark. And I am taking part in the project called, Optimal Wellness, Development and Health for Danish Students Through New Nordic Diet. What we have been looking at, in my part of the project, is the importance of healthy school lunch on concentration and learning. And concentration is your ability to keep on in the work which might be pretty boring for a long time and making the correct decisions. And learning is a rather stable process where you become more proficient, for instance in reading and mathematics. Before we started our project we made a study of the international literature as we always do getting into a new field, and the publication was called, Food, Learning and Behaviour Among Children. And it was published in 2009. We went through everything there was at this time, and what you could see is that there was only one study which made a comparison between food and learning. And it was an observational study, which is not quite as good as a ICT study. But anyhow, it was very well performed and they had correction for a lot of factors and social background, et cetera. And therefore, I think this is a pretty good study. What it showed is that there is a positive relation between healthy food and learning, in terms of. Reading and writing. There was nothing for mathematics, and talking about behavior there was very little as well. So, so far, this was the only study in the field. [NOISE] Talking about school meals, you could look at what they get for morning snack. The lunch or the afternoon snack, but you also have to look upon, did the children or the students have any breakfast before they came to school. And what we can see is that if children have skipped their breakfast before coming to school, they do not learn as well as when they had breakfast. I think most people know it from their own experience. And we have had a few students, started this about the importance of the snack in the morning. And it seems that snack in the morning is most important if you did not have any breakfast. When we go to snack in the afternoon, they are very limited studies. But, when we are looking at the total amount of food in school we can see. That if you have good healthy food in the school, learning will be improved. And when we are talking about learning in this study, we are looking at the, how well the children read and how well they write, we have nothing about mathematics or the subject there is. Then we have another study, which in fact is from Denmark. the study is called Food Nurtures Learning. And this is a qualitative study, which means that they have used observations. They have used interview, both individual interviews and group interviews, focus group interviews. It was made in four Danish schools and it was published in 2010. And here we do not have any effect on their learning, but we can see more sociological effects that having a free school lunch means something for the students because they are presented for food an ingredients they had never seen before perhaps. And we can also see the importance of students sitting together eating the same food. And on top of this, it can be important if you try to use what you get in this meals, in this free school lunch to take into your teaching about healthy food, and not so healthy food. But when we are talking about effect, a qualitative cannot tell us [INAUDIBLE] about that. Now we come to our own study, the Opus as we call it. Which stands for Optimal wellbeing, development and health for Danish student through New Nordic Diet. And we made our experiment in 2012, 2013. And it was a crossover study, means that all students have been both controlled subjects and experimental subjects. When we are talking about general experience, you can think of yourself. As I mentioned, we have very few studies. But think of yourself. What does it mean for your work performance, study performance, when you have, healthy food? New Nordic Diet. We use Nordic ingredients. But we also use, use new use of ingredients. Ingredients you knew before. But they are used, used in another context. It is dependent of the time of the year. And, It is, is also used as modern knowledge about health and wellness. Let us get to the school food. All children had a snack around 9:30 AM, which consists of breads and vegetables, and the children have lunch usually between 11:00 and 12:00. And lunch is a hot meal, eating with knife and fork. And, eating together in the class or in a separate room. And, this is something else, than in the usual Danish schools. Because usually you bring your own lunchbox and the parents determine what is going to be in the lunchbox. Then we have an afternoon snack. called box on the run. Which contains fruit, bread, nuts or dried berries. And if you take all this the morning snack the lunch, the afternoon snacks, you cover about 45% of students daily energy consumptions. Of course, then you have another 55% that you do really not know much about. But we try to have a look at into it by examining the, the, the diet they have at home or outside the school. Then who participated in this experiment? We had nine Danish schools included, and from these schools we had in these schools there were 1,021 students in third and fourth grade. We chose to use third and fourth grade because at this, in this age, students are more receptive to other foods that they do not know that they will be both later in their development and earlier in development. So, these students were invited. But some did not want to participate, or their parents did not want them to participate for some reason or another. It might be religious reasons and so we went down to 832 students which is the same as 82% of all those invited, and we think this is a rather high figure. If we look at the students, 14% of the students were overweight. And we think that especially for overweight students who often have low self esteem, this new Nordic diet would be very good. Another aspect of this study is that students participated in preparation of food. Not all students of course, but a selection of the students. help to, for the preparation, and this means that after a while all students had tried this. And as I told you before, all students were both experimental and control groups in a cross over design. And what did we taste? What we tasted was. Concentration. Reading ability. Mathematics performance. Learning climate, and general wellness. Of course many of you would think, how do you do this? And therefore, I am now going to show you how we did it. The test of concentration is done on paper with a pencil. And these sheets are distributed to all the students in the classroom at once, and we have an external administrator that takes the test, it's not the regular teacher doing it. because it has to be done in exactly the same way, and this test is taken three times during the project. At start, in the middle, and at the end, and it is exactly the same. And students would normally not be able to remember how they did it last time, so we instruct them everytime. What you see here, is only part of the test because otherwise, you wouldn't be able to see the figures there. In fact, you, what you see here is in total six lines. and in each line, there are two different letters. There's a d, and there's a p. And on top of the letter there are some small signs, it might be two below, it might be one below, it might be two above, and it might be one above or nothing. And the instruction for the student is, you should look at the letter d. And when you see the letter d, you should look at the number of signs above and below. And if they are two either below, above, or together, you should make a circle around this letter. And you should not look at the p's, so concentrate on the d's. And the number of lines above and below. And in each line here you can see 24 letters in total. In the actual tests, there will be 48, and there would be 14 lines and not 6 lines. Before we take the test, the students are instructed to make a small sample test in the first page, and, it is used for the instruction I've just given you here. And then you go to the real test, and it is done on time, and it is done on time to stress the students. So they are told. Now go ahead and after eight seconds you say, stop. Go to next line, then eight seconds, stop and go to next line, and so on until you have covered all fourteen lines. So this is a rather stressful test. And, the test should not really be covered with intelligence and your reading ability. Because what you see here are just some signs. The students might know this is a d and a p. Most would [INAUDIBLE], would do it when we are talking about grade three and four. But in fact, the test can be used from grade one, and up until. You die at 100 or 110. The test is a German test, and it is developed for diagnosis. It is a diagnostic tool, but what we use it here, is to test the concentration performance of all students involved. It's very easy to administer, and it's very east to score it. And in total it takes less than ten minutes of time for the students. And, here I'm going to show you our reading test. And again, it's only an example. It's also done as a paper and pencil test. And the [INAUDIBLE] students are having this test and were told, you have to look at a picture. And then you have to read a text and see if the text and the picture is going well together. And if it's, it's if it's correct to, and if it's correct you have to mark it as yes or on the green mark. And if it's wrong, then you have to put a mark in the red box. What you see here is to the left, you see a picture or a drawing of a ship, and there are some people on board the ship, who are waving. And in the harbor, you see some. two grown up people and some children. And you have to compare these two things. So what you test about the children is, are they able to read the text? And are they able to understand what is in the text in relation to the picture? The text says, everybody had left the ship, which was in the harbor. And if you look at the picture you can see, well there are some people on the ship so this is not true. So you mark it as not true. The next text says the ship should sail and they were waving goodbye. And when you look at the picture you can well, this is true because they are waving, and probably they are gong to say goodbye as well. And on the third one, it says the family were waving goodbye before the ship should sail, and if you look at the people on ground it looks like a family and they are waving, so this is true as well. And on the fourth one it says now it is tame, time to say goodbye. And of course, you can see this seems very natural that they are saying goodbye, and the ship is going to sail. So, this is right as well. So this is the first example. that is a rather big picture. And this text, [INAUDIBLE], which has, very big letters and the sentences are not very complex. But, during the test, the pictures are getting smaller and the text is going to be more complicated and the letters are getting smaller so you are able to differentiate between those who have a high reading performance and those who have a low reading performance. And now I'm going to show you the mathematics test. In the mathematics test, we test if they know something about succession and if they know something about numbers. And here, what you can see here. Is something taken out of a calendar. So you can see on each of these there's indication of a month, and this indication of which day it is. And then the, the instruction here is to try to draw lines between the first one in the calendar, and the next one, and then the third one, and the fourth one, and so on. And it is shown by a line just to introduce the students for this, and of course the first one is January and the next one is February, and then the students should be able to recognize that the 5th of January is before the 19th of February, and draw a line here. And next they should try to see which one is going to be the next. And then you can see a small line up there showing that now you should go to May on the 14th and so on. And there a lot of other mathematics tests, it's very simple in the beginning. As this one and it gets more and more complicated. And these tests only cover one school year while the reading test was covering several school years. And now I'm going to show you the next test, which is a Danish test made by one of my colleagues saying something about general wellness. I think we all have an idea of, of what wellness is but how can we measure it. And of course you cannot find instrument [INAUDIBLE] which can do this, so therefore, we do it on an an, analog scale as here. Where you, to the left, you have a sad smiley. And to the right you have smiley, which is glad or which has feels well. And we have five different areas in this wellness rating scale, the first is covering the area where you live. The next is covering the school. The next is covering your peers in the school, in the class. And the fourth is covering your family. And the fifth is how about yourself. So this is done on paper as pencil as well. You deliver this sheet to the children. Explain them now the first one is about your environment where you live. So you should put a cross here on this line so the children even from a very low age, even when they go to kindergarten, are able to do this. And then you can measure how well they feel us on their home environment, on the school. together with their pals in the class on the school, the family, and how about yourself? And this is the last of our tests, which is also developed by one of my Danish colleagues. And it is called Learning Rating Scale. It is about the learning environment that you are sitting in. In the school covering a lot of fields where you have to learn. And again the students are asked to put a cross on a line on this, with a sad smiley on one end and a happy smiley at the other end. And the first is going on your academic learning. How do you feel about the ability to learn, all academic areas. That means reading, mathematics, science, foreign languages, and so on. So here, the student, again, put a mark. But it's, learning is not only about the academic skills, of course. The social environment and conditions for learning are also very important for students in school. So on the sixth, on the next line, the second line, the student have to put a mark about the social learning environment. But of course, the way the teachers teach is also important and teachers should teach in many different ways and methods. And here the students are asked about the way the teachers are teaching them, is that providing a good learning environment? And then we come to the last one's, that is, the student expectation to his or her own learning. Of course, you need to have a good expectation or rather high expectation for the progression of your own learning to perform really well. And here we have an indication of this. these two last scales, they take only about one minute to finish. So it's very easy and very fast to do it and it's very easy and very fast to mark them, because all you need is a scale to see where they put their mark. And what did we find? Well, we have found some very interesting things about the importance of new Nordic diet for ability in some of the fields I've mentioned. when we look at our results which I cannot tell you right now, we can see that much of this is in line with what other studies have shown. Both international studies and the two Danish studies. In some areas, the results are significant, positive. And, in others they are insignificant. But it is really interesting to see what new Nordic diet means for childrens. Cognitive functioning for learning and for concentration. Thank you. [MUSIC]
