Can Mindfulness Meditation Improve Short-term and Long-term Academic Achievement in a Higher-education Course?

Abstract

Mindfulness meditation involves focusing one's attention on the present moment in a non-judgmental way. Several recently published investigations have demonstrated that a brief session of mindfulness meditation, practiced before a higher-education course lecture, can improve performance on a quiz over lecture content given immediately following the lecture. It is less clear how mindfulness meditation, practiced before multiple course lectures, impacts performance on quizzes over time as well as on a cumulative exam over all lecture contents. The present experiment compared a mindfulness meditation group to an active control group; each practiced 6 min of mindfulness or relaxation prior to seven course lectures. Following each lecture, a quiz was given over lecture contents to measure short-term academic achievement. A cumulative exam was later given over all lecture content to measure long-term academic achievement. In contrast to prior published investigations, there were no effects of mindfulness meditation on academic achievement. Given these promising yet inconsistent effects, future work should explore the moderators (i.e., individual differences; duration, frequency, and style of meditation practice) of mindfulness meditation's salutary benefits.

Keywords:

• Mindfulness meditation
• academic achievement
• higher education
• learning

Notes

1 It may also be the case that the study was underpowered and a Type II error occurred; that is, mindfulness meditation did have an effect on exam performance but went undetected. However, the numerically higher exam scores for the control section imply that this may not be the case.

2 The low number of quiz questions posed a validity and reliability concern. As this study wanted to replicate and extend the findings of Rambsurg and Youmans (2014) and Calma-Birling and Gurung (2017) in a real-world classroom, we measured academic achievement with the quiz and exam format that the course professor used.

3 As noted in Van Dam et al. (2017), it can be legitimately questioned whether such a treatment should be referred to as “mindfulness meditation,” given the differences in intent, practice, and context with traditional forms of mindfulness meditation. As this treatment incorporated a focused attention practice that is commonly used with meditation novices, and as these were the same instructions that Ramsburg and Youmans used to demonstrate an effect of such treatment, we considered these instructions to be a form of mindfulness meditation practice.

4 We did not include post-treatment measures of mindfulness or relaxation, nor adherence to study instructions. As detailed in the Discussion, these are admittedly study limitations. However, Ramsburg and Youmans were unable to observe mediation of mindfulness meditation’s effects via mood, relaxation, class interest, or the relationship between mindfulness and lecture topic. Further, our main focus was replication and extension of academic achievement efficacy using a mindfulness treatment that could feasibly be implemented in a real-world classroom setting. Therefore, to minimize course disruption and use available time to focus on short-term and long-term academic achievement, we did not include such mediator and validity measures.

5 The outcomes reported in Results did not change whether raw scores or z-scores were used.

6 Gender within each group was not reported in Calma-Birling and Gurung nor Ramsburg and Youmans.

7 Slightly inconsistent with this speculation are the results of Ramsburg and Youmans, whose effect sizes across three experiments decreased as the percentage of female participants increased.

8 Similar to the exam scores in Calma-Birling and Gurung (2017), as the control group in the current experiment had numerically higher scores on several quizzes and the exam this is unlikely to be the case.

9 We again note that there is no one agreed upon definition of mindfulness meditation.