Are your students absent, not absent, or present? Mindfulness and student performance

Abstract

The concept of mindfulness has received significant attention in recent years as the effects of ubiquitous distractions become more apparent in the workplace and in education. This study examines the relationship between three measures of mindfulness and student performance among a sample of 922 students in introductory economics classes from two large public universities. The authors’ measures of mindfulness include general dispositional mindfulness levels, frequency of mobile device usage during class as a measure of classroom mindfulness, and frequency of test anxiety as a measure of assessment mindfulness. The results show a positive association between all three measures of mindfulness and overall performance. The association between dispositional mindfulness and performance was greater for female students and students with lower grade point averages.

Keywords:

• behavioral economics
• economic education
• mindfulness
• self-awareness

JEL CODES:

• A22
• A29

Acknowledgments

The authors thank JEE Associate Editor Georg Schaur and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2015 EconED Conference on Teaching, the 2016 WEAI Pacific Rim Conference, the 2016 Midwest Economics Association Conference, the 2016 Global Academic Institute Business & Economics Conference, the 2016 AEA CTREE Conference, and the 2017 ASSA/AEA Conference. The authors thank the participants and discussants for helpful comments.

Notes

1 We chose to use self-reported data for several reasons. First, obtaining IRB approval for a large sample size from two universities involving the behavioral aspects of students is only practical with a survey method. Second, the survey approach allowed us to collect responses throughout an entire year across multiple sections with different instructors in order to conduct regression analyses with adequate control variables. And third, a survey approach is less likely to be tainted by inconsistencies in the manner by which data are collected, although the co-principal investigators supervised the data collection in every class.

2 A total of 1,572 students completed the class in all sections, from which 1,081 (69%) surveys were collected and 922 were complete enough to be used for analysis. There were eleven total sections taught by five different instructors. The class average was based on students in each section who completed the survey and did not withdraw from the class. Approximately 8 percent of all students who completed the survey did not complete the class. We recognize that mindfulness may be related to both class performance and class attrition. However, given that our dataset consists of students who completed the surveys and the class, we cannot measure the variables relationship with class attrition.

3 Note that students were asked about their social media usage in terms of absolute usage on a daily basis, whereas the mindfulness variables were based on a Likert scale.

4 Durbin-Wu-Hausman tests for the endogeneity of mindfulness and student performance suggest that endogeneity is an issue.

5 We acknowledge that even with the necessary conditions for identification met, there are still potential areas for bias in the instruments. Several alternative specifications of the first stage equation were attempted; each provided consistent qualitative results with different quantitative estimates. Therefore, we do not claim to show the precise impact of mindfulness on performance, but are confident that the empirical method reveals a consistent, independent effect.