By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.
“It may not be the typical way to start an English class, but Gonzalez’s students were familiar with these five-minute mindfulness exercises—from counting breaths and focusing on the sensations of breathing, to visualizing thoughts and feelings—that he uses to help train their attention, quiet their thoughts, and regulate their emotions.” – Lauren Cassani Davis
Childhood is a time of rapid learning and brain development. A key for the child is the development of the ability to focus, attentional ability. Children, in general, have relatively brief attention spans. In the modern world they are bombarded with a myriad of distractions, many of which require only brief moments of attention. For children to benefit maximally from learning opportunities, particularly in school, being able to focus attention is imperative. Mindfulness training in school, at all levels has been shown to have very positive effects. These include academic, cognitive, psychological, and social domains. Mindfulness practices, since they involve practicing attentional focus, have been shown, not surprisingly, to improve attention.
Since attentional ability is so crucial to children’s development, it is important to better understand what promotes its development and what methods can be implemented with children to improve it. In today’s Research News article “Cognitive Effects of Mindfulness Training: Results of a Pilot Study Based on a Theory Driven Approach.” See:
or see summary below or view the full text of the study at:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4940413/
Wimmer and colleagues randomly assigned German fifth grade school children to receive either a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program that was adapted for children, a concentration training program, or no treatment. MBSR is a complex mindfulness development program that contains practices in meditation, body scan, and yoga. Training occurred over 25 weeks with twice weekly sessions of one hour each. The children were assessed prior to and after treatment with measures of sustained attention, cognitive flexibility, cognitive inhibition, and data-driven information processing.
They found that the MBSR group showed less of a decrease in sustained attention (vigilance task) than the no treatment group over the 25 weeks. All three groups improved in cognitive flexibility, demonstrating improved ability to look at things in different ways. MBSR training produced a significant improvement in cognitive inhibition, the ability to screen out certain stimuli in order to better process others, and in data-driven information processing. Hence, MBSR training produced significant benefits for the children improving their attention and ability to screen out distractors. This latter finding is important as children at this age, in general, have great difficulty in restraining themselves from responding to irrelevant stimuli in the environment.
These preliminary results suggest that mindfulness training may be of benefit to children in developing attentional abilities that are crucial to school performance. Since the MBSR program is complex, it cannot be ascertained whether training in meditation, body scan, or yoga or some combination of these practices was the crucial component that led to improved attentional abilities. This was a pilot study. It clearly suggests that further, more intensive, study is warranted which may begin to clarify what are the crucial aspects of the training for the development of attention in children.
So, improve schoolchildren’s thinking with mindfulness.
“Growing up as a child in East Harlem, where the poverty rate is extremely high, the asthma rate is extremely high and obesity rate is high — in addition to the complications our families deal with as a result of living in poverty — having a time to center yourself is important to allow our children to have access to learning.” – Eve Colavito
CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies
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Study Summary
Wimmer, L., Bellingrath, S., & von Stockhausen, L. (2016). Cognitive Effects of Mindfulness Training: Results of a Pilot Study Based on a Theory Driven Approach. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 1037. http://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01037
Abstract
The present paper reports a pilot study which tested cognitive effects of mindfulness practice in a theory-driven approach. Thirty-four fifth graders received either a mindfulness training which was based on the mindfulness-based stress reduction approach (experimental group), a concentration training (active control group), or no treatment (passive control group). Based on the operational definition of mindfulness by Bishop et al. (2004), effects on sustained attention, cognitive flexibility, cognitive inhibition, and data-driven as opposed to schema-based information processing were predicted. These abilities were assessed in a pre-post design by means of a vigilance test, a reversible figures test, the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, a Stroop test, a visual search task, and a recognition task of prototypical faces. Results suggest that the mindfulness training specifically improved cognitive inhibition and data-driven information processing.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4940413/