No abstract

This Research Brief was developed for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The number of school-based mindfulness programs (SBMPs) for students has been increasing over the last fifteen years. They’ve been developed for students from pre- kindergarten through high school (P–12 settings). While the reach of SBMPs is substantial, their introduction has outpaced research on their effectiveness across diverse sociocultural contexts and school environments, and with students of different ages and backgrounds. A look at studies conducted between 2000 and 2019 showed that SBMPs improve students’ mindfulness and self-regulation skills. Further, there is promising evidence that these programs reduce students’ feelings of anxiety and depression, support their physical health, and assist them in engaging in healthy relationships with others. However, there is little consistent evidence at this time that SBMPs reduce students’ anger and aggression or improve their well-being, and further study is needed to adequately assess program impacts on students’ school behavior and performance. In the coming years, more scientific research on SBMPs is needed to determine: which kinds of practices and program elements work best, what outcomes they influence, and which students are impacted the most. Recommendations for practitioners considering the use of SBMPs are offered.

Mindfulness training programs require the completion of daily out-of-class meditation practices, often referred to as "homework," and individuals who adhere to these requirements have better outcomes. Nevertheless, many people fall short of the recommended amount of meditation practice. Two field studies tested whether the formation of action plans-strategic plans for when and where to meditate-would support out-of-class meditation practice. Study 1 was a 3-month longitudinal study of adolescents who participated in a 5-day meditation retreat. Immediately before and after, and then 3 months later, adolescents answered questions about emotional wellbeing. Immediately after the retreat, adolescents also answered questions about their commitment to continue meditating, and action plans for when and where to meditate. Three months later, they reported on their meditation frequency. Study 2 was a between-subjects experiment in which adults enrolled in an 8-week mindfulness program were randomly assigned to an action plan condition or a control condition. Personal commitment to practice meditation was assessed at baseline, out-of-class meditation frequency was assessed weekly, and emotional well-being was assessed at the beginning and end of the 8-week program. In both studies, individuals who formed strategic plans for when and where to meditate meditated more frequently, but only if they also had a strong personal commitment to do so. Further, out-of-class meditation days mediated the association between action plans and emotional well-being among participants with strong personal commitment. Collectively, these results suggest that although mindfulness is about nonreactive awareness of the present, its practice is enhanced by planning ahead.

Objectives Research on school-based mindfulness programs (SBMPs) indicates promising, albeit mixed, effects. However, there has been a lack of consistency and completeness in implementation reporting, frustrating efforts to draw causal inferences about the implementation elements that influence program outcomes. To address these issues, we crafted a conceptual framework with an accompanying set of key terms for SBMP implementation elements to guide the development of flexible and practical implementation reporting recommendations for studies of SBMPs. Methods To develop the framework and recommendations, we drew insights from the implementation science and school-based prevention literature, explored reporting standards across behavioral science fields, and examined reviews and studies of SBMPs that had an implementation focus. Results The SBMP Implementation Framework (SBMP-IF) is organized by four broad categories (i.e., the program, participants, context, and implementation), which inform the reporting recommendations. The recommendations nudge researchers toward more complete and consistent reporting of school contextual factors, participant characteristics and responsiveness, and teacher training/competence. They also encourage researchers to explicitly identify and incorporate into their theories of change and measurement strategies the Hypothesized and/or Validated Core Components of the program, as well as the key elements of the Implementation Support System. Finally, the recommendations urge researchers to define and operationalize mindfulness in their theories of change and consider child development when implementing and studying SBMPs. Conclusions The recommendations offered are novel for the field of SBMPs and represent a bold effort to strengthen the evidence base and help discern for whom SBMPs work best and under which conditions.

In a mixed-methods study following 1551 adolescents from eight diverse schools across the US, a large majority demonstrated (a) strong norms of actively open-minded thinking (AOT) and (b) a widespread capacity for AOT. Students from two public (government) schools, two private (public) schools, and two charter (academy) schools were followed for 18 months over the transition from middle school to high school, with data collected in each semester of the eighth grade and ninth grade year. The study included an unusually varied set of approaches to assess AOT values and habits, including a rating scale, two new multiple choice measures, teacher reports from three teachers per student, peer nomination, and interviews with subsets of the larger sample. These varied measures converged to reveal widespread openness to disagreement, desire for understanding, and pluralistic norms. In interviews, participants demonstrated AOT in three powerful ways: deep search for ideas, epistemic empathy, and pluralistic thinking. Moreover, repeated administration of measures indicated moderate intertemporal reliability of this trait, with six-month test-retest correlations ranging from .27 to .59 depending on the measure. This research suggests that existing capacities for AOT could be more fruitfully leveraged and supported by educators, helping students to capitalise on their own values and intuitions as they develop into mature critical thinkers. [Corrections made on 24 August 2020 after first online publication: 'web search' was incorrectly used throughout this article and it has now been corrected to 'search' in this version] Keywords adolescence, cognitive development, critical thinking. Ever since Dewey (1916), there has been a growing push to teach students not just what to think, but how to think. Eighty percent of Americans think schools should teach critical thinking (Gallup, 2013). Critical thinking is front and centre in the Common Core Standards, a set of curricular goalposts rolled out in 2009 and now adopted by 42 states (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2016). But if we as a society want to teach our children to be good thinkers, we had better have some idea how a good thinker thinks. Baron (1988, 1993) suggested that the best critical thinking is actively open-minded; that is, characterised by a deep and unbiased search for alternatives, evidence, reasons, and goals. Long reflection is not sufficient for good thinking if it is merely an elaboration of support for a favoured conclusion (Wason and Evans, 1975); a balanced consideration of alternatives is also necessary.