Chewing Gum Could Raise Math Grades In Teens

In a study likely to make school janitors cringe, researchers say that chewing gum may boost academic performance in teenagers.

Many schools ban chewing gum because children often dispose of the sticky chaw under chairs or tables.

But a team led by Craig Johnston at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston found that students who chewed gum during math class had higher scores on a standardized math test after 14 weeks and better grades at the end of the term than students in the class who did not chew gum.

"For the first time we've been able to show in a real-life kind of situation that students did perform better when they were allowed to chew," says Gil Leveille, executive director of the Wrigley Science Institute, a research arm of Wrigley, which funded the study.

Leveille says Wrigley has gotten feedback for years from many of its customers who say chewing gum helps them stay focussed. So, four years ago the company started the science institute to see if any of these claims had merit.

The researchers at Baylor studied four math classes or 108 students aged 13 to 16 years old from a Houston, Texas, charter school that serves mostly low-income Hispanic students.

About half got free Wrigley's sugar-free gum to chew during class, homework and tests. They chewed at least one stick of gum 86 percent of the time they were in math class and 36 percent of the time they were doing homework. The other half went without.

After 14 weeks, the gum chewers had a three percent increase in their math scores on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills achievement test, a small but statistically significant change, according to Johnston and colleagues.

They found no difference in math scores between the two groups in another test called the Woodcock Johnson III Tests of Achievement. However, the gum-chewers did get better final grades in the class than their non-chewing peers.

Another study found that college students in a lab who were given difficult computer tasks had lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol when they were chewing gum compared to when they were not.

Leveille believes chewing gum helps reduce stress so students can do their best work. And he's hoping the findings may change schools view about chewing gum in class.

"It's not a matter of chewing. It's a matter of gum disposal," says Leveille, adding that that can be overcome by teaching proper disposal behaviours.

"If that fails, we'll have to provide the janitors with scrapers."

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