Panoramic view of the effects of active breaks in an educational context

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In education, optimising academic achievement (AA) and promoting attention and concentration are essential elements. The main goal of this systematic review (SR) is to analyse and synthetise the scientific evidence to examine the impact that the different interventions with active breaks (AB) have on the AA, attention, and concentration of the students in educational contexts. To do this, the PRISMA protocol is followed (REG INPLASY: INPLASY202390082). The documents that comply with the inclusion criteria for this research are 29 scientific articles extracted from the databases Web of Science (WOS), SCOPUS and ERIC. The specific goals of this study are detailed through 13 research questions related to the characteristics of the works and their results, e.g. thematic and geographic diversity, variability in the research designs, inclusion of several educational levels and academic contents, as well as the presence of common intervention modalities and heterogeneous durations. The panoramic view suggested by the results presents AB as an interdisciplinary topic of international interest mainly focused on basic education, with measure instruments that are diverse and have variable duration, which might influence the comparability between studies. Even though some studies back up the positive effects of AB, the heterogeneity of approaches and results highlights the need of future research in order to unify criteria and allow a better understanding of the effects of AB and their applicability in several educational contexts.