Exercise, Nutrition, and Love of Learning as Predictors of Critical Thinking Skills in Elementary School Students: Evidence from Indonesia's Seven Habits Framework

Abstract

Critical thinking is a foundational twenty-first-century competency, yet international assessments continue to show Indonesian students trailing global benchmarks, prompting renewed attention to the everyday, non-academic habits that may underlie children's cognitive development. This study tested whether exercise habits, nutritious eating, and love of learning -- three of the habits foregrounded in Indonesia's national Seven Habits of Great Indonesian Children framework -- jointly and individually predict the critical thinking skills of sixth-grade elementary students. Using an ex post facto, associative quantitative design, data were collected via Likert-scale questionnaires from all 38 sixth-grade students (saturated sampling) at a public elementary school and analyzed with multiple linear regression in IBM SPSS Statistics 26. All three predictors significantly and positively predicted critical thinking: exercise habit (B = 0.275, t = 2.511, p = .017, standardized beta = .250), nutritious eating (B = 0.384, t = 3.767, p = .001, standardized beta = .397), and love of learning (B = 0.262, t = 2.997, p = .005, standardized beta = .377). Nutritious eating was the dominant predictor. Together, the three variables significantly predicted critical thinking, F(3, 34) = 59.140, p < .001, explaining 83.9% of its variance (R-squared = .839; adjusted R-squared = .825). Diagnostic testing confirmed normally distributed residuals, no multicollinearity (tolerance > .29, VIF < 3.4 for all predictors), and no heteroscedasticity. The findings suggest that cultivating children's critical thinking benefits from attention to physical and dispositional habits, not only classroom pedagogy, with implications for whole-child education policy in comparable elementary school systems worldwide.