Mindfulness enhancing social, emotional and cognitive development.
Study: Schonert-Reichl et al. (2015). Enhancing Cognitive and Social-Emotional Development Through a Simple-to-Administer Mindfulness-Based School Program for Elementary School Children: A Randomized Controlled Trial.
Summary: This page discusses a study, in an elementary school, implementing a social-emotional learning program involving mindfulness and its benefits. The researchers are trying to prove that this type of program will enhance cognitive control, reduce stress, promote well-being and prosociality, and produce positive school outcomes. They believe that social-emotional learning can be used in school to combat other problems experienced lately such as bullying, dropout, and mental health issues. Social-emotional learning (SEL) along with academics are both important to focus on in order to educate children today.
To solve problems and promote resilience in children, social-emotional education is proven to help. Executive functions are another way to promote well-being. Executive functions (EFs) deal with cognitive control over behaviour. In order to implement this into the program for the study, the researchers used mindfulness because it incorporates the strategies of executive functions. Mindfulness has been researched and shown to benefit adults but has not been adequately researched for children. The research that has been done has mostly dealt with depression and not the concerns of this study (well-being, prosocial behaviour, learning, and stress regulation).
The study used a sample of 99 children, evenly mixed of fourth and fifth graders from four different schools. They came from families whose average income equaled out to around the median income of Canada, where the study took place. They also came from diverse cultural backgrounds. The students ranged in age from 9 years to 11 years. The focus was on this age group because they are in late childhood. In this stage children develop personalities, behaviours and capabilities that continue throughout life. This is also the time right before puberty begins where progress in EFs is most productive. At this time children are also becoming more aware of the feelings of others. By teaching SEL along with mindfulness can help prevent mental health problems along with some of the other issues that arise around this time of transition in life.
The study split these students in half. One half was given an SEL program that included mindfulness called “MindUP” and the control group was given a business as usual (BAU) social responsibility program. The groups were measured on EFs, end-of-year math grades, social-emotional competence and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA). The hypotheses of the researchers was that those in the MindUP program would show more improvement on all measures except for in that of social responsibility because of the focus in both programs on this matter.
The MindUP program was made up of 12 lessons. The lessons were meant to be taught once a week and lasted between 40-50 minutes. The mindfulness portion of this program was done three times, three minutes each time. The students were to focus on their breathing and on listening to a single sound. Self-regulation, EFs, SEL, and positivity were the subjects included in the lessons of the program. Lessons also involved acts of kindness and community service learning activities. A positive classroom environment was another aim of this program.
The social responsibility program was based on British Columbia’s Ministry of Education. There are four main points to this program: contributing to classroom and school community, solving problems in peaceful ways, valuing diversity and depending human rights, and practicing democratic rights and responsibilities.
Teachers from each group kept a record of the lessons taught. Notes were taken on any information left out of the lessons and logs were turned in to assess. Pre- and post-tests were given to all students and diurnal cortisol samples were taken from each student by a research assistant. Math scores were also collected and EF tasks were administered on computers.
The authors noted three limitations to the study. First, the analyses’ were done at the child level but randomisation to conditions was done at the classroom level, limiting the casual interference of the study. Second, notable differences between the baselines of each group were found for the self-report on empathy and most of the behavioural assessment indices. Third, raters on teacher and peer assessments were not blind to treatment conditions. Knowledge about experimental conditions may have influenced the assessment on prosocial and aggressive/antisocial behaviour in the study.
The original hypotheses of the researchers was proven to be almost entirely right when the results from the programs were assessed. Students in the social-emotional learning program with mindfulness (MindUP) improved more than the control group in cognitive control and stress physiology, greater empathy, perspective taking, emotional control, optimism, school self-concept, and mindfulness. They also showed decreases in depression symptoms and peer-related aggression, increases in peer acceptance, and were rated by peers as more prosocial. The mindfulness portion of the program increased inhibitory control, by increasing increasing control of emotions while decreasing aggression.
Overall this study provided precise research that is not readily available. The implementation and comparison of social-emotional education in the school provided practical information for teachers to use. This study could be used to back up a teacher who feels adding social-emotional learning would aid her students. Proof is shown here that it does create increases in academic performance and overall classroom environment. MindUP would be a worthwhile program to implement into a classroom because of the minimal time it takes up and the proven results in this study.
It would be interesting to see this same program implementing in another grade setting to see if it would have the same positive affect. It would have been nice to see a broader range of students included in the study. This study only observed 99 children and they were almost all from the middle class. I would like to see if this program would have the same results in different settings and on different social classes. Overall, I found the study helpful in my discovery of social-emotional learning and its benefits in the public school classroom.
Explain whether mindfulness can enhance the development of children. (4) June 2018