What staff have to say about mindfulness with wise minds:
What students have to say about mindfulness with wise minds:
What the research says:
Research in this burgeoning field is rapidly expanding, and Oxford University is undertaking a large scale longitudinal study to assess the impact of mindfulness in the classroom. In the meantime, many promising smaller scale studies suggest positive impacts of mindfulness on student and teacher wellbeing, and can be quickly reviewed in Emily Campbell's Mindfulness in Education Research Highlights and Kim Rempel's Mindfulness for Children and Youth: A Review of the Literature with an Argument for School-Based Implementation.
- reduced rates of absenteeism, rule infractions, and suspensions (Barnes, Bauza, & Treiber, 2003)
- decreased blood pressure (Barnes, Treiber, & Davis, 2001; Gregoski et al, 2010).
- positive impact on problematic responses to stress (Mendelson, et al, 2010).
- (LD participants) demonstrated decreased state and trait anxiety, enhanced social skills, and improved academic performance (Beauchemin, Hutchins, & Patterson, 2008)
- (Psychiatric facility outpatient adolescents) reduced symptoms of anxiety, depression, and somatic distress, and increased self-esteem and sleep quality (Biegel, Brown, Shapiro, Sherbert, 2009)
- reductions in depression (Bluth et al, 2015; Raes et al, 2014).
- increases in optimism and teacher-rated classroom social competent behaviors (Schonert-Reichl & Lawlor, 2010)
- fewer attention problems and reduction in anxiety symptoms and behavior problems (Semple, et al, 2010)
- Children who were less well regulated showed greater improvement in executive function (EF) (Flook et al, 2010)
- improved focus and attention (Napoli, Krech, & Holley, 2005)
- improved in their cognitive control and stress physiology, reported greater empathy, perspective-taking, emotional control, optimism, school self-concept, and mindfulness, showed greater and stronger peer relationships. (Schonert-Reichl et al, 2015).
- (Kindergarten) greater improvements in social competence and earned higher report card grades in domains of learning, health, and social-emotional development, whereas the control group exhibited more selfish behavior over time (Flook et al, 2015)
- (Preschool) improved self-regulation. (Razza, Bergen-Cico, & Raymond, 2013)
- significant reductions in psychological symptoms and burnout (Flook et al, 2013; Jennings et al, 2013; Roeser et al, 2013).
- increases in self-compassion (Flook et al, 2013; Frank et al, 2015; Roeser et al, 2013)
- significant gains in self-regulation (Frank et al, 2015)
- increase in focused attention and working memory capacity (Roeser et al, 2013).
- decreases in the students’ challenging behaviors and increases in their compliance with teacher requests began during mindfulness training for the teachers and continued to change following the training (Singh et al, 2013)
For full bibliography, see:
Campbell, E. (2014). Mindfulness in Education Research Highlights. Greater Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life. Retrieved from: http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/mindfulness_in_education_research_highlights