Archery and children's focus: Oktafiranda 2026

Fifteen primary school children from south Jakarta, six boys and nine girls aged between 9 and 12, none of whom shot a bow, took six 60-minute archery sessions spread over a month. Before and after, concentration was measured with the Concentration Grid Test: a ten-by-ten grid, each cell holding a two-digit number between 00 and 99, to be found in order over one minute.

The mean score goes from 2.33 ± 2.1 to 9.47 ± 4.6, that is 7.14 points more. The lowest value rises from 0 to 3 and the highest from 5 to 17. The Wilcoxon paired test gives Z = −3.327 with p = 0.001, and the authors conclude that archery improves children's concentration.

The six sessions covered basic technique in the usual order: stance, nocking, hooking, set-up, drawing, anchoring and release. For the children, a mean age of 10 years, a height of 133.6 centimetres and a weight of 30.7 kilos are reported. No measure was collected of what the children managed to do with the bow, nor any measure of attention beyond the grid.

The design is pre-experimental, single group with a measurement before and after. The sampling is purposive, with stated inclusion criteria: attending that school, being between 9 and 12, not being a competitive archer, giving consent and being willing to complete the whole series of sessions. Collection lasted a month.

The instrument is the Concentration Grid Test attributed to Harris, 1984: a grid of a hundred cells with two-digit numbers arranged out of order, in which the numbers must be found in ascending sequence within one minute; the score is how many are found. The example figure is attributed to a popular source.

The intervention is six 60-minute archery sessions, with the basic technical progression. The procedure called for an initial measurement with the grid, the six sessions, and a final measurement with the same grid.

The analysis starts from the Shapiro-Wilk normality test; since the initial data were not normally distributed, the before-and-after comparison was made with the Wilcoxon signed rank test. In the text of the procedure the authors also describe a control group with no intervention, but in the results a single group appears, of fifteen children, and the comparison reported is within that same group.

The Concentration Grid Test improves on its own when repeated, and this is the problem that settles everything else. Anyone who has taken it once knows the search strategy, that is to scan the grid in an orderly way and remember where they had got to: the second administration almost always gives a higher score without anything having changed in attentional capacity. Without a group repeating the grid without shooting a bow, the rise from 2.33 to 9.47 cannot be attributed to the six sessions.

The initial values make this plainer still. On the first attempt these children found between 0 and 5 numbers in a minute, with a mean of 2.33: out of a hundred cells that is a score indicating, more than anything, that they had not understood the task. A fourfold rise from that level is what happens when the task becomes clear, not a measure of cognitive change.

The control group is described in the procedure and does not exist in the results. The text says the posttest was administered «to both groups» and that the results can be compared «for both groups», while the stated design is single group, the subjects number fifteen and the test reported is a paired comparison within the same group. What remains is a contradiction inside the paper, not a control group deliberately left out.

There is no measure of the shooting. It is not known at what distance they shot, with what equipment, how many arrows, nor how they got on: the exposure is described only as six one-hour sessions. So even taking the rise at face value, the study does not say which part of the activity would have produced it, and does not distinguish archery from an hour of any other activity with an adult giving instructions; the authors acknowledge this point among their limitations, along with having worked in one school and on one age band.

Concentration is measured with that grid alone, a one-minute paper task, with no other attention tests and no reliability data on this sample. The abstract's conclusion, that archery «was proven to be effective», is stronger than a single-group design with a practice-sensitive instrument can support.

The discussion, finally, drifts from the data. It opens with attention deficit disorder and a percentage about learning difficulties in those children, while the sample was not assessed for any of this, and it states that archery stimulates the prefrontal cortex citing a secondary source, with no brain measure anywhere in the study. The journal is a local publication, marked as regional in the register, and the text contains several misprints.

For anyone bringing archery into schools, the honest thing to say is that this study is not evidence. The score on the number grid quadrupled, but that grid improves on its own the second time it is taken, and there was no comparison group: the result is consistent with children who simply understood the task.

A useful piece of context remains, though. An initial score of between 0 and 5 numbers found in a minute shows how little these 9 to 12 year olds could sustain an orderly search on a first attempt. If the number grid is used at a club or in a school, this is why it should be given several times before any value is taken as a reference: the first two measurements say more about learning the test than about concentration.

The programme in itself is reproducible and reasonable: six one-hour sessions, with the basic progression from stance to release. Anyone organising an introductory course at a school finds a structure here, and a low-cost assessment format to go with it, with the caveat just stated.

What cannot be said on the basis of this work is that archery improves attention more than other activities. The authors acknowledge this themselves: there was no comparison with another physical activity. And there is nothing in the data about the brain, despite what the discussion suggests.