Academic impacts of a mindfulness-based intervention on early grades students attending high-needs schools

Abstract

Academic impacts of school-based mindfulness programs (SBMPs) have been far less studied than social and emotional ones (Roeser et al., 2022), which is surprising considering the intuitive as well as documented ability of mindfulness exercises to train attentional mechanisms. The current study was set up to examine the impact of an SBMP on the executive function, verbal performance, and math performance of a sample of students (n’s = 1,116-1533) in the K-2 grades, relative to a more traditional, social scenarios-based social and emotional learning (SEL) program. 32 Chicago Public Schools were randomly assigned to either the treatment group, which employed the Calm Classroom K-2 program (CCK2; Luster Learning Institute), or the active control group, which employed the district’s default SEL program, Second Step (Committee for Children). The CCK2 group demonstrated advantages in verbal performance after one year of programming (impact estimate = .35 SD) and no other statistically significant program impacts, although any non-trivial differences also favored CCK2 (impact estimates = .05 - .21 SD). Treatment-control differences after two years were smaller, which was contrary to expectations. Exploratory moderation analyses did not reveal any specialized findings within subgroups (e.g., gender, race), or by implementation fidelity. Findings are discussed in terms of the conservative design, implementation challenges in a large-scale program within high-needs public schools, and the different potential mechanisms operating in these programs, making them more complementary than competitive, and suggesting merit in offering non-cognitive activities that employ both “internal” and “external” approaches.