Healthy Learning Mind – a school

It has been reported that mindfulness interventions are acceptable for children and adolescents, as well as feasible, and that they improve for example attention, emotional reactivity and some areas of meta-cognition [1]. Mindfulness-based programs have improved school-aged children’s attention and teacher-rated social skills [45]. A school-based (RCT) study showed significant improvements in post-treatment measures of self-rated test anxiety, teacher rated attention, social skills, objective measures of selective (visual) attention but no sustained attention, as well as improved behavioral regulation, metacognition, and overall global executive control among children who started out with poor executive functions [43]. Correspondingly, in another study [44] adolescents with lower pre-intervention self-regulation were observed to experience greatest improvements in behavioral regulation, meta-cognition and executive function. Preliminary research has shown that school-based mindfulness intervention programs may also result in beneficial outcomes regarding the interaction and pedagogical atmosphere among both students and students and their teachers [50].

In the school setting, mindfulness interventions reach the whole age group, and through the equal reach may even act as a counterforce for the prominent development of increasing inequality between different groups (based on e.g. gender, learning difficulties, health challenges, or socioeconomic background), yet empirical evidence is lacking.

While cost-effectiveness and ease of implementation of mindfulness programs in schools are notable advantages, sufficient evidence is still lacking on the role of mindfulness in fostering resilience, mental health and well-being among children and adolescents, over and above existing approaches such as relaxation. The previous studies conducted among youth are still few in number [1, 9, 23, 38–40, 43–45, 51, 52], and their methodological shortcomings (e.g. small sample sizes without control groups and/or unstandardized mindfulness intervention programs) prevent making generalizations of the efficacy of these interventions [9]. For instance, it is not well understood whether the observed changes persist or what the short and long-term effects of mindfulness intervention are [40]. Further, the role of mindfulness in improving health behavior among adolescents is not well known [53, 54].

It might be at place to state here also that the Finnish school system offers exceptionally good possibilities for examining between-individual variation as the school-related variance is minimized due to the homogenous schools system of our country: All schools follow the national curriculum, private schools are almost non-existent, and majority of students go to the nearest school in their residential area. Also areal segregation is still rather low compared to other countries. Furthermore, all teachers receive university education which reduces the teacher-related variance.