Article
Does A Brief Mindfulness Intervention Impact Quiz Performance?
Psychology Learning & Teaching 0(0) 1–13 ! The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1475725717712785 journals.sagepub.com/home/plat
Destany Calma-Birling and Regan A.R. Gurung University of Wisconsin Green Bay, USA
Abstract Mindfulness practices improve cognition, emotional balance, and well-being in clinical and non-clinical populations. The bulk of mindfulness research in higher education has focused on improving psychological and cognitive variables, leaving academic performance largely unexplored. We investigated the effects of a brief mindfulness intervention on quiz performance in two sections of an undergraduate upper-level human development class (N ¼ 67). We used a between-group experimental design (waiting control group) and compared student quiz scores. Students assigned to practice mindfulness performed better on the first two quizzes than the control group. When the control group received the mindfulness intervention, there was no significant difference on quiz performance between the two groups. Mindfulness training did not impact state mindfulness or exam scores. Taken together, our results suggest that small doses of mindfulness training can briefly enhance students’ knowledge retention of lecture content. Keywords Mindfulness, higher education, mindfulness-based interventions, student learning
Introduction Over a hundred years ago, educators recognized that a crucial cognitive capacity related to academic achievement is knowing how to direct and sustain focused attention on relevant stimuli. For example, William James famously said, ‘‘the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will . . . An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence’’ (James, 1890, p. 424). However, he went further on to say that this was ‘‘easier to define this idea than to give practical directions for bringing it about.’’ Today, researchers in psychology and neuroscience are beginning to reveal that training in mindfulness is rooted in Corresponding author: Destany Calma-Birling, Department of Human Development and Psychology, University of Wisconsin Green Bay, 2420 Nicolet Drive, Green Bay, WI 54311, USA. Email:
[email protected]
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what James regarded as, ‘bringing back a wandering attention over and over again’ (e.g., see Slagter, Davidson, & Lutz, 2011). Practicing mindfulness involves moment-to-moment monitoring of attention with an emphasis placed on sustaining focus on the present (Gallant, 2016). When the mind wanders or distraction arises, individuals are taught to acknowledge these internal or external distractors (e.g., thoughts or sounds) and shift attention back to the present without judgment. Mindfulness is most commonly defined as, ‘‘the awareness that arises from paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, nonjudgmentally’’ (Kabat-Zinn, 2003, p. 145). Within the literature, mindfulness is conceptualized as both a distinct form of attention and awareness (i.e., a mental state) and as a dispositional trait that is cultivated through regular mindfulness practice (Brown & Ryan, 2003). Mindfulness-based interventions are increasing in popularity as empirical research continues to reveal the beneficial effects associated with formal mindfulness practice (mindfulness meditation). Randomized controlled studies consistently show that mindfulness interventions have a therapeutic effect on a broad range of medical conditions and psychological disorders (e.g., chronic pain, chronic stress, depression, anxiety, and addiction) and a performance enhancing effect on cognitive and affective variables such as attentional skills, metacognitive awareness, and emotional stability in healthy populations (for a review, see Creswell, 2016). Overall, cultivating mindfulness has been shown to facilitate adaptive psychological functioning that results in positive psychological effects (e.g., increased subjective well-being, reduced psychological distress, and improved behavioral regulation) in both clinical and nonclinical populations (Keng, Smoski, & Robins, 2011). Past research indicates that the involvement of executive functions may help explain the beneficial effects of mindfulnessbased practices on psychological health and well-being (Short, Mazmanian, Oinonen, & Mushquash, 2015). This is consistent with recent neuroscientific findings that show mindfulness training is associated with enhanced functioning in brain regions related to attentional control, emotion regulation, and self-awareness (Tang, Ho¨lzel, & Posner, 2015). Taken together, the empirical literature suggests that mindfulness training may enhance important cognitive abilities and psychological mechanisms that facilitate academic achievement. In a recent systematic review of mindfulness-based interventions in schools, Waters, Barsky, Ridd and Allen (2015) report that various countries across the world have developed mindfulness-based programs, such as England (Mindfulness in Schools Project, DotB), the United States (Mindful School and MindUp), Canada (Mindful Education), Israel (The Mindfulness Language), and India (The Alice Project). This international educational interest in the utility of mindfulness programs reflects the growing amount of empirical studies investigating the effects of mindfulness-based interventions in school settings. In a recent meta-analysis, Zenner, Hernleben-Kurz, and Walach (2014) found that in grades K-12, mindfulness training had the largest effect on students’ cognitive performance, resilience, stress, and emotional problems, respectively. Furthermore, preliminary evidence suggests that mindfulness interventions improve children’s academic performance (e.g., Bakosh, Snow, Tobias, Houlihan, & Barbosa-Leiker, 2016; Beauchemin, Hutchins, & Patterson, 2008; Thierry, Bryant, Speegle Nobles, & Noris, 2016). In higher education, mindfulness-based interventions are also found to benefit students. For example, in college student populations, mindfulness training has been shown to reduce stress and anxiety (Bamber & Kraenzle Schneider, 2016), improve psychological well-being (de Vibe et al., 2013), sleep quality and mood (Caldwell, Harrison, Adams, Quin, & Greeson, 2010), and enhance various cognitive abilities such as executive attention, working-memory, cognitive
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inhibition, and cognitive flexibility (Moore, Gruber, Derose, & Malinowski, 2012; Moore & Malinowski, 2009; Morrison, Goolsarran, Rogers, & Jha, 2014; Tang et al., 2007; Zeidan, Johnson, Diamond, David, & Goolkasian, 2010). These enhancing effects on cognitive functions are particularly important as previous research indicates that deficits in executive functioning is a predictor of impaired academic performance in college students (Knouse, Feldman, & Blevins, 2014). Researchers suggest that mindfulness interventions may be one promising avenue to facilitate academic achievement in college student populations (e.g., Shapiro, Brown, & Astin, 2011). However, empirical studies examining the effect of mindfulness training on academic performance remains sparse. The purpose of this study is to add to the wanting literature by exploring how a brief mindfulness intervention may enhance college student learning. To our knowledge, there are only two studies that examined the impact of brief mindfulness training on college students’ academic performance. In one study, researchers investigated if 10-minutes of mindfulness practice bi-weekly would enhance psychological well-being and student learning (Yamada & Victor, 2012). College students participating in this research enrolled in one of two sections of a psychology course with identical content and learning material. At the end of 15 weeks, students in the mindfulness condition reported greater self-compassion, decreased perceived levels of stress, trait and state anxiety, and less ruminative thinking in comparison to the control condition. However, there were no significant differences in learning outcomes (i.e., class exam scores and total points for the class) between the mindfulness and control condition. The authors suggest that the learning outcomes were not an accurate or appropriate measure to capture the effect 10-minutes of mindfulness practice can have on student learning (Yamada & Victor, 2012). In another study, Ramsburg and Youmans (2014) conducted a series of randomized controlled experiments in three different college classrooms and investigated if a brief mindfulness practice impacted students’ post-lecture quiz performance. Students participated in a six-minute mindfulness training or rest condition, listened to a class lecture, then completed a post-lecture quiz that assessed students’ knowledge of the lecture material. Students who received the mindfulness training scored better on the post-lecture quiz compared to students who rested. Taken together, these two studies point towards the possibility of using small doses of mindfulness practice to enhance students’ short-term learning. However, it is empirically unclear if enhancements in short-term knowledge retention will lead to improvements in students’ long-term learning (Ramsburg & Youmans, 2014). The goal of the current study is to integrate and bridge the gap between the two previous studies (i.e., Ramsburg & Youmans, 2014; Yamada & Victor, 2012) examining the impact of brief mindfulness training on college student learning. In this study, we created a very brief mindfulness intervention to investigate if five minutes of mindfulness practice would benefit students’ course learning. We set up a between-group experimental design that compared students’ quiz and exam scores. We hypothesized that students in the mindfulness group would perform better on quizzes than the comparison group. We also tested if students practicing mindfulness would perform better on exams and show higher levels of state mindfulness compared to the control group.
Method Participants Students enrolled in two sections of an upper elective human development course at a midsized four-year university in Wisconsin, U.S.A. participated in this study (N ¼ 67;
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9 males and 58 females). We used a between-group quasi-experimental design. The first group of participants consisted of 28 students. The second group of participants consisted of 39 students. Both groups met every Tuesday and Thursday for an hour and twenty minutes. The course instructor (not either author) granted access to the student population.
Materials Meditation Style. Participants were taught how to practice focused-attention meditation. The basic instructions that were given to students are summarized in four steps: (1) voluntarily direct and sustain attention on a chosen object (e.g., the breath); (2) recognize when the mind wanders and becomes distracted (e.g., thoughts or sounds); (3) reorient attention away from distractors and shift attention back to the breath; and (4) cognitive reappraise distractor (e.g., ‘‘just a thought’’, and ‘‘it is okay to be distracted’’) (Lutz, Slagter, Dunne, & Davidson, 2008). Focused-attention meditation was taught to students through a brief, six-minute video-clip by Dr. Jeffrey M. Schwartz (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼oH1H3eC_ KFE), a research psychiatrist at the School of Medicine at the University of California at Los Angeles. Mindfulness. We used the State Mindfulness Scale (SMS: Tanay & Bernstein, 2013) to assess mindfulness defined as a state-like mental behavior in the present moment. The SMS consists of 21 statements in which students used a 5-point scale ranging from 1 (not at all) to 5 (very well) relating to objects of which one is mindful (e.g., I was aware of different emotions that arose in me) and the quality of how one is mindful of those objects (e.g., It was interesting to see the patterns of my thinking). Reliability for the scale was a ¼ 0.94. Quiz. We used three quizzes to test knowledge retained from lectures. The first author, who served as a teaching assistant for the course, developed the quizzes. The quiz tested content from the lecture that was given the same day. For Quiz 1 and Quiz 3, students were told at the beginning of each lecture that a quiz would be administered during the last five minutes of class. For Quiz 2, students were not informed that they would be administered a quiz during the last five minutes of class. All quizzes consisted of 10 multiple choice questions. Exam. The course consisted of three exams, designed independent of the intervention and tested knowledge about lecture material. Prior to the intervention, students had already completed Exam 1. Students completed Exams 2 and 3 during the intervention period. The course instructor developed all three exams. Exams consisted of multiple choice questions, short answer questions, and essays.
Procedure The Institutional Review Board approved this study. The intervention took place the tenth week of the semester. Group 1 began class by watching an 18-minute video on racial discrimination in everyday life. The video represented a no-treatment control. Following the video, the instructor distributed consent forms while informing students that at the start of every class, they will spend the first five minutes reviewing course notes (except for exam
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Figure 1. This figure displays a schematic process of the entire procedure.
dates and special occasions; see Figure 1). At this time, the professor also announced to students that a quiz would be administered during the last five minutes of class relating to the content covered in the next 60 minutes. Then, the instructor proceeded as normal with the lecture on the topic of cross-cultural human development.
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Group 2 began class by listening to a 12-minute PowerPoint presentation on mindfulness relative to education delivered by the first author. Following the presentation, students watched the six-minute video on focused-attention meditation described above and were invited to engage in a five-minute mindfulness practice. In addition, students were told that the first five minutes of every class would be dedicated to practicing mindfulness till the end of the semester (except for exam dates and special occasions; see Figure 1). Then, the course instructor distributed consent forms to students. After consent forms had been collected, the mindfulness practice began. Once five minutes passed, the teaching assistant asked the participants to stop. The professor informed the class she would administer a quiz during the last five minutes of class relating to the content covered in the next 60 minutes. The second group’s lecture and quiz was identical to the first group’s lecture and quiz. The following week, students in both classes took a quiz on the lecture content of that day. However, for this quiz (Quiz 2), the professor did not inform students in either class about the quiz being administered during the last five minutes of class. Both the control group (i.e., the class who were instructed to review their notes) and the mindfulness group received identical lecture content and quiz. During class on the day preceding the last week of classes (i.e., the week before finals), students in the control group (Group 1) were instructed by the professor to view the mindfulness presentation available on the course management system (Desire2Learn) over the weekend. By utilizing Kaltura software, the mindfulness presentation was made identical to the content presented to Group 2 earlier in the semester. The mindfulness PowerPoint was transformed into a 12-minute live presentation, which included narration over the slides and Dr. Schwartz’s mindful breathing instructions. Both the online and in-class presentations were the same in length and had identical content. During the next class, the teaching assistant greeted Group 1, briefly reiterated the directions of Dr. Schwartz’s mindfulness breathing instructions, and invited the students to participate in mindfulness meditation for the first five minutes of class. Group 2 practiced mindfulness meditation for the first five minutes of class. The next class, both groups practiced mindfulness for the first five minutes of class. Following the mindfulness meditation, the students completed the SMS (only once). The professor collected the SMS and informed both classes that during the last five minutes of class, a quiz would be administered on the class content that is covered in the lecture. The lecture and quiz were identical in both classes. At this time, Group 1 practiced mindfulness a total of two times and Group 2 practiced mindfulness a total of nine times. Figure 1 provides a schematic of the entire procedure.
Results Before testing our main hypothesis, we tested for any pre-existing differences between our experimental group and the control group. We conducted a one-way analysis of variance on Exam 1 scores. There were no significant differences between groups, F(1,65) ¼ 0.005, p ¼ 0.943, n2p ¼ 0.37. Table 1 shows the major descriptive data for main variables in our study. We also tested for associations between quiz scores, exam scores, and state mindfulness. Table 2 shows the main correlations. Not surprisingly, most quiz scores related to exam scores (e.g., Exam 1 and Quiz 1, r(55) ¼ 0.41, p ¼ 0.002). State mindfulness was not significantly related to any exam or quiz scores.
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Table 1 Means (M) and Standard Deviations (SD) for Major Dependent Measures.
Mindfulness Section Control Section
M SD N M SD N
Exam 1
Exam 2
Exam 3
Quiz 1
Quiz 2
Quiz 3
SMS
43.51 6.52 39 43.63 5.92 28
48.91 6.30 39 50.50 4.39 28
48.46 6.26 39 48.89 5.56 28
8.97 1.1 33 7.91 1.95 22
9.24 0.83 29 8.53 1.17 19
8.70 1.09 30 9.08 0.91 25
3.56 0.66 29 3.52 0.73 24
Note: SMS ¼ State Mindfulness Scale.
Table 2 Correlations Among Exams, Quizzes and State Mindfulness Scale (SMS). Variable
1
2
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
– 0.60** 0.48** 0.41** 0.211 0.10 0.110
– 0.74** 0.37** 0.41** 0.05 0.106
Exam 1 Exam 2 Exam 3 Quiz 1 Quiz 2 Quiz 3 SMS
3
4
5
6
7
– 0.195
–
– 0.37** 0.41** 0.18 0.150
– 0.39* 0.14 0.245
– 0.27 0.245
Note: *p < 0.05; **p < 0.01.
To test our main hypothesis, we conducted a repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) with quiz as the within-subjects factor and class section as the between-subject variable. We found a significant main effect of quiz, F(2,36) ¼ 12.29, p < 0.001, n2p ¼ 0.41 (Pillai’s Trace), and a significant quiz by section interaction, F(2,36) ¼ 10.66, p < 0.001, n2p ¼ 0.37. Students in the experimental condition performed better on both Quiz 1 and Quiz 2. As hypothesized, when both class sections had mindfulness meditation before Quiz 3, there was no significant difference between groups. In order to test whether the mindfulness meditation had any effect beyond the quizzes on the three course exam scores, we conducted a repeated measures ANOVA with exam as the within-subjects factor and class section as the between-subject variable. We found a significant main effect of exam, F(2,64) ¼ 42.61, p
