Archery and school burnout: Akhmad 2022 study

At an Islamic junior secondary school in Wuluhan, in the Indonesian province of East Java, 64 pupils who were being taught from home during the pandemic took up archery as a recreational activity between February and July 2021. Their level of study exhaustion (school burnout) was measured before and after, in five bands from very low to very high.

Before the archery period 12 pupils were in the high or very high bands (8 and 4); afterwards there were 3 (1 and 2). The very low band grew from 16 to 27, while the middle band stayed at 21. A Wilcoxon test on the two measurements gives Z = -3.607, with p reported as 0.000. The authors conclude that archery offered as play reduced the pupils' burnout, and report that after shooting the children said they felt refreshed and in good spirits.

The design is a before-and-after comparison on one group, with no control: all 64 pupils involved took part in the activity, which ran for six months as one of the school's extracurricular activities, outdoors and supervised by a teacher. The paper does not say how often or for how long they shot, at what distance, with what bows and arrows, or how the five burnout bands were built: the measuring instrument is not named and nothing is said about its reliability. The analysis is a single Wilcoxon signed-rank test.

Six months without a comparison group, in 2021, also cover the gradual return to school, timetable changes and everything else the pandemic stirred up in that period: the drop in burnout could come from any of these. The authors themselves write that not all pupils were interested in archery and that the activity schedule was not kept regularly, so it is not known how much each pupil actually shot. The measuring instrument, the amount of shooting and any data on drop-outs are missing; the results are only counts per band. The pupils' impressions reported in the discussion were not collected by any stated method.

For anyone who shoots or coaches, the study changes nothing: it concerns children who were not archers and an activity whose length and frequency are unknown. It describes a school that used archery as a break during a hard period and saw fewer pupils report study fatigue, without being able to separate the effect of archery from that of time passing. In the registry it counts as a weak signal on recreational archery in children, not as evidence that archery reduces burnout.