BackgroundIn existing research on the importance of student breakfast, few studies have focused on the impact of breakfast on student cognitive development. Further, empirical research in this field is mostly based correlation analysis, in which it is difficult to control the influence of selection bias on the analysis results.Material/MethodsHere, we used student academic performance, based on the academic quality monitoring data of Jiangsu basic education students, as a proxy variable for cognitive development, and used both ordinary least-squares regression and propensity score matching methods to analyze the impact of eating breakfast on the cognitive development of primary and middle school students.ResultsWe found that it is still common for students in primary and secondary schools to go without breakfast, and that this is even true in middle schools. Whether students eat breakfast is affected by many factors, and the frequency of eating breakfast has a significant positive impact on student achievement.ConclusionsIn primary school, students who eat breakfast every day in a week scored 31.322 points higher in academic performance than those who did not. In middle school, students who ate breakfast on time every day had significantly better academic performance (31.335 points higher) than those who did not eat breakfast every day. This indicates that eating breakfast every day has a significant effect on the cognitive development of students.

Previous studies have found that good physical exercise can promote academic performance, but the underlying mechanism behind this lacks large-scale empirical data. Based on this, we used the 2020 Jiangsu Province academic quality monitoring data to construct an OLS regression. Then, the non-cognitive abilities variable was built with the NEO-FFI Theory, and the mediation effect diagram was drawn through the Amos22.0 software. The study found that: (i) Physical exercise brought academic improvement to elementary and middle school students. (ii) The influence mechanism of physical exercise was different between elementary school and middle school. Students at the elementary school were directly and indirectly affected. (iii) In non-cognitive specific dimensions, openness played a significant and great mediating role.

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To improve children's academic achievements, parents often try to provide them with adequate nutrition or/and send them to attend extracurricular tutoring classes. The effect of extracurricular tutoring on students' performance has been well explored, whereas no rigorous empirical study was conducted to observe the relationship between breakfast and students' academic performance. Besides, little empirical evidence has been presented to compare the effect of breakfast and that of extracurricular tutoring on students' academic achievements. This study fills this gap by adopting the multiple linear regression model and Shapley Value Decomposition to analyze the academic quality monitoring data of 50,516 Year-3 students and 83,505 Year-8 students in Jiangsu, China. The results showed that both breakfast and extracurricular tutoring can improve students' grades, and breakfast was superior to the tutoring in efficacy. This conclusion is of great significance for planning family education strategies scientifically and improving family education efficiently. It is necessarily convincible for parents and educators to rationally understand the role of extracurricular tutoring and pay enough attention to breakfast in improving students' performance.

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