Eficacia de un programa de entrenamiento en mindfulness en el rendimiento académico, las funciones ejecutivas y el bienestar subjetivo de estudiantes de educación primaria y secundaria españoles e italianos

• Autores: Angela Lori
• Directores de la Tesis: Francisco Javier Cano García (dir. tes.), Eva María Padilla Muñoz (dir. tes.), Antonino Raffone (dir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universidad de Sevilla ( España ) en 2021
• Idioma: español
• Número de páginas: 481
• Enlaces
  • Tesis en acceso abierto en: Idus
• Resumen

  • Recently schools started seeking innovative ways to support students who are experiencing obstacles regarding academic, behavioral and emotional challenges arising in the classrooms. Mindfulness interventions in scholls arose as a potential solution for students, after adult’s mindfulness-based interventions effectiveness has been scientifically demonstrate in the last years. Still scarce are the controlled trials evaluating the mindfulness interventions’ efficacy between young people in school settings. The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the school-based program of mindful practices Mindful Schoolsin a quasi-experimental controlled study on 207 Spanish and Italian state schools’ students ages 8-9 and 13-14 years. Academic grades have been collected from the teacher's reports; questionnaires have been completed by parents assessing children’s executive functions and by students, assessing mindfulness and emotional intelligence before, after and after 5 months from the end of the program. Data analysis indicates some improvements on mindfulness level, academic achievements, executive functions (especially emotional control and behavioral regulation) and emotional intelligence (mostly in stress management and interpersonal ability) for middle schools’ and Italian students. Literature supports these findings and the effectiveness of mindfulness programs in schools’ settings during adolescence, considered the most favorable period for mindfulness acquisition thanks to the greater brain plasticity. The mediation analysis of mindfulness level in the postest on the other variables, was not significant. This kind of analysis are rare in other studies. The moderation analysis demonstrates that students with initial lowest Metacognition Index (executive function difficulties) increased their level of mindfulness more than others. These results indicate a stronger effect of Mindful School program on students with executive function difficulties. With these results we can affirm that Mindful School program can be useful for adolescent students to have better awareness level, academic achievements, executive functions and emotional intelligence but more scientific studies are needed to confirm these findings. Future works should have active control groups and can be longitudinal studies to observe how students react recieving mindfulness program in adolescence if they already received mindfulness programs in their childhood; moderation analysis can be conducted to identify which students’ characteristics can improve with mindfulness programs. It would be interesting to have more studies with mediation analysis to understand if the mindfulness level influences other variables. Moderators as gender, doses of mindfulness classes, instructor experience, main characteristics of programs also can be studied.