Investigation of the associations between physical activity, self-regulation and educational outcomes in childhood

It is common knowledge that physical activity leads to physiological and psychological benefits. The current study explored the association between physical activity and self-regulation longitudinally and the indirect relationship this may have on academic achievement, using secondary data on primary and secondary school children from the Millennium Cohort Study, a cohort of infants born in 2000–2001 in the United Kingdom. There are two main findings. First, there is a positive link between physical activity and emotional (not behavioural) regulation both concurrently and longitudinally across all three time points, 7-years-old, 11-years-old and 14-years-old. The relationship was negative for emotional regulation and negligible for behavioural regulation when controlling for socioeconomic status. Second, across two time points (due to data availability), physical activity positively predicted academic achievement through emotional regulation for 7-year-olds and behavioural regulation in 11-year-olds. The impact of this relationship was more pronounced when controlling for socioeconomic status. Together these findings indicate that emotional regulation is linked to physical activity in early childhood. Subsequently, emotion regulation predicts academic attainment, suggesting that early interventions might focus on attention rather than behaviour.


RESPONSE:
We have added the full name socioeconomic status before "high-SES" at line 38.
The editor and reviewer 3 have raised the same point with a different recommendation of structure. In response to your concerns about the length and amount of information in the introduction, we have substantially moved some of the paragraphs to the Discussion based on your recommendations ("Relations between Self-Regulation and Academic Achievement" 23 lines) and removed other lines (28 lines). Overall, we have shortened the introduction from 10 pages to 7 pages. Specifically, we now provide a more streamlined introduction section that is consistent with yours and Reviewer 3 recommendations. We have adopted the recommended sub-headings by Reviewer 3 and therefore kept one of the two sub-sections that you suggest to move to the discussion section. We have also followed your recommendations of "what we know, what we don't know" throughout each sub-heading of the introduction. Based on Reviewer 3 comments we have included the sub-heading "PA and long-term outcomes" in the introduction and although it is important, this does not necessarily form part of the model or study so they are lines which could be excluded altogether. Please confirm whether this should be included or not.
COMMENT: Method: Line 240: Please provide the full name before the abbreviation "MCS." Please move this part to the results section: "The sample under analyses comprised 14% of children whose first language spoken was not English, 10% who came from large families (> 3 children), 10% from workless households, 10% who were born pre-mature, 10% who were part of a single parent household and 37% of mothers experiencing psychological distress. The average maternal age at birth was 29.84 years (SD = 5.47). Approximately 16% of main carers had no education status with the remainder holding GCSE grades A*-C, A-Level, diploma and degree. The housing tenure of families was owned or mortgaged (72.9%), privately renting (6.4%), socially renting (17.6%) or other (2.1%). The occupational status of families was managerial and professional (40.4%), intermediate occupation (14.8%), small employers (12.3%), supervisory and technical occupation (8.6%), or semi-routine and routine occupations (24%) from lowest to highest. The family income quantiles were 1st (14.4%), 2nd (16.6%), 3rd (20.8%), 4th (21%), and 5th (24.3%) from lowest to highest level." Additionally, frequency as a missing component of the latent variable PA is noted as a weakness of the study at lines 590-591 see below for wording. "Second, the data on the frequency of physical activity was not available. The combination of intensity, frequency and duration better represents the construct physical activity as whole and is likely to predict self-regulation and academic achievement for children who are disadvantaged as they have lower participation rates." In the age of 14 years the academic achievement was not measured. Please add this fact to the discussion section.

RESPONSE:
We have also added "due to data availability" to lines 471 to the discussion section in relation to physical activity and academic achievement.
Line 357: Please add information about the assessment of the SES. When and how was it assessed? RESPONSE: We have included the following sentence "The data was collected through parental self-report questionnaire, assessed between 0-5 years of age." at lines 302-303. Response: We added a sentence in "Measures" section subsection "Socioeconomic status" to refer to table 1 before its presentation.

Results
In my opinion, the results section starts on line 435. The previous information relates to the methods (statistics).

RESPONSE: We have moved the "Data analysis" section to the Methods section.
Line 430: Please include the number of the addendum.
Line 437: Please include the number of the addendum.

RESPONSE:
We have updated all lines to refer to the supplementary material in the required format.

RESPONSE:
We have added further clarification to the sentence " Figure 1 present the results of the structural model indicating the relationship between latent factors physical activity, emotional regulation and behavioural regulation in the short term at age 7 and 14, in the long term from age 7 to 11 and whether this association is linked to academic achievement. The model was also tested with SES factors which is shown in figure 2." at lines 450-455.