Effects of Mindful Awareness Practices on Executive Functions in Elementary School Children

Abstract

A school-based program of mindful awareness practices (MAPs) was evaluated in a randomized control study of 64 second- and third-grade children ages 7–9 years. The program was delivered for 30 minutes, twice per week, for 8 weeks. Teachers and parents completed questionnaires assessing children's executive function immediately before and following the 8-week period. Multivariate analysis of covariance on teacher and parent reports of executive function (EF) indicated an interaction effect between baseline EF score and group status on posttest EF. That is, children in the MAPs group who were less well regulated showed greater improvement in EF compared with controls. Specifically, those children starting out with poor EF who went through the MAPs training showed gains in behavioral regulation, metacognition, and overall global executive control. These results indicate a stronger effect of MAPs on children with executive function difficulties. The finding that both teachers and parents reported changes suggests that improvements in children's behavioral regulation generalized across settings. Future work is warranted using neurocognitive tasks of executive functions, behavioral observation, and multiple classroom samples to replicate and extend these preliminary findings.

KEYWORDS:

• education
• intervention
• mindfulness
• executive control
• metacognition
• behavioral regulation

This work was supported by MARC (http://www.marc.ucla.edu) and the authors thank the families and teachers who participated in this study, MAPs teaching assistants Yaffa Lerea and Adrienne Levin, Dr. Suzie Tortoro for her help in developing movement-related activities, and Daniel Siegel for his contributions to the research.