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The Impact of Mindful Awareness Practices on College Student Health, Well-

Being, and Capacity for Learning: A Pilot Study

Article in Psychology Learning & Teaching · June 2012

DOI: 10.2304/plat.2012.11.2.139

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Psychology Learning and Teaching
Volume 11 Number 2 2012
www.wwwords.co.uk/PLAT

The Impact of Mindful Awareness Practices

on College Student Health, Well-being,
and Capacity for Learning: a pilot study

KIYOMI YAMADA & TARA L. VICTOR

Department of Psychology, California State University,
Dominguez Hills, Carson, USA

This preliminary study examined the feasibility and potential utility of mindful awareness practices
(MAPs) in terms of enhancing student learning in the college classroom, as well as improving
psychological well-being. One of two identical undergraduate psychology sections included a 10-
minute MAP at the beginning of every class (mindfulness group n = 37; control group n = 23). Primary
learning and secondary self-report outcomes were obtained. Controlling for significant demographic
covariates, students in the mindfulness group demonstrated significant increases in mindful awareness
traits and reductions in rumination and state anxiety compared with controls. While mindfulness
intervention did not lead to significant improvement in academic performance across the semester,
81% of students self-reported positive effects of MAPs on their learning. It is concluded that it is feasible
to incorporate MAPs into a regular college classroom. MAPs may help improve student psychological
well-being. Although students perceived themselves to benefit from their mindfulness practice, further
research is needed to examine the effects of MAPs on student academic performance.

Introduction
College life can be stressful (e.g., Misra & McKean, 2000). Given that stress is known to impair
attention and concentration (e.g., Skosnik, Chatterton, Swisher, & Park, 2000), when students lack
adequate skills for coping with stress, it can negatively impact their capacity for learning in the
classroom environment (Stotland, 2001).
Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR; Kabat-Zinn, 1982, 1990) is a formal programme
developed to cultivate a trait known as mindfulness, and has been found to be an effective
programme for stress management. The concept of mindfulness itself has been broadly defined in
the literature as a means of ‘paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present
moment, and nonjudgmentally’ (Kabat-Zinn, 1990, p. 430), and could be described as a type of
attention training. Most theorists and practitioners agree that mindful-awareness skills can be
cultivated and learned through a variety of trainings and practices (Germer, 2005).
Recent reviews and meta-analytic investigations (Baer, 2003; Grossman, Niemann, Schmidt,
& Walach, 2004) have demonstrated the utility of mindfulness techniques for the treatment of a
variety of mental and physical problems in adults, and have more recently been used with children
(Semple, Lee, Rosa, & Miller, 2010; Zylowksa et al., 2008). Further, current literature points
towards the potential for mindfulness to affect the structure and neural patterns present in the
brain (e.g., Lazar et al., 2005). As a result, exploration of the potential benefits of mindfulness in
educational environments is now beginning to emerge.
Theoretically, it is suggested that students’ capacity for learning will increase when students
cultivate their skills to focus on, observe, and reflect upon the self by using their mind as the object

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Kiyomi Yamada & Tara L. Victor

of their reflection (Siegel, 2001, 2007). According to Siegel (2007), ‘at the heart of mindfulness is the
learnable capacity for this type of reflection’ (p. 259), and the author has proposed that teaching
reflective skills be considered a fundamental part of basic education. Review of the empirical
literature reveals that recent studies examining the utility of mindfulness practices in early
educational settings have shown benefits of mindfulness trainings, including improvements in
attention, social skills, mood (e.g., anxiety, depression), academic functioning, externalising
problems, and executive function (Flook et al., 2010; Napoli, Krech, & Holley, 2005; Semple, Reid,
& Miller, 2005).
Would mindfulness be beneficial to incorporate into the higher education community? There
are programmes that are beginning to use this kind of contemplative education in university
settings; however, most of the current research is limited to investigating the physical and
psychological health benefits of using mindfulness with college or medical students (e.g.,
Rosenzweig, Reibel, Greeson, Brainard, & Hojat, 2003; Shapiro, Schwartz, & Bonner, 1998) or is
based solely on qualitative analyses of student responses to the intervention (Holland, 2004, 2006).
There have been no empirical studies done to measure the utility of mindfulness in enhancing
student learning at the college level.
The purpose of this pilot study was to investigate the potential effects of one form of
mindfulness practice on student learning outcomes in a college student population. It was predicted
that mindfulness practice would not only improve student learning outcomes, but would also
increase mindfulness traits (i.e., students’ awareness of their here-and-now experiences, openness
and empathy towards themselves and others), cultivate a sense of self-compassion, reduce
ruminative thinking, and decrease perceived levels of stress, as well as state and trait levels of
anxiety as desired secondary outcomes in the context of a university classroom setting.

Method
Participants
Participants for the current study were students who were enrolled in one of two sections of an
undergraduate upper-level psychology class offered at a four-year university in southern California.
These two class sections had identical learning goals, materials, contents, and assignments
described in their syllabi. Students enrolled in their respective sections were blind to the assignment
of mindfulness versus control group.
The total number of participants was 64. Four participants (three in the mindfulness group
and one in the control group) dropped out of the classes during the first few weeks, and their
reasons for dropping out were unknown. No adverse experiences related to the study intervention
were reported by the participants, and it is typical for students to change their class schedule in the
first few weeks of any given semester. The final sample included 60 participants (37 mindfulness
group and 23 controls) who completed the entire study. The average age of the participants was
25.9 years (SD = 6.5) and the sample consisted of 16 male and 44 female students. The distribution
of ethnic background was diverse and representative of the larger university population.

Procedure
Institutional review board approval was obtained for this study. Participants were provided with
the information sheet including a general overview of the study and procedures before their
consent were obtained. The study intervention was a 10-minute mindfulness meditation led by an
instructor at the start of each bi-weekly class period throughout the course of one 15-week
semester. The practice was derived from the principles of MBSR (Kabat-Zinn, 1990) and consisted
of brief introductory material (provided only in the first session) followed by guided mindfulness-
based practice focusing on sitting meditation (for the remainder of the sessions). In this mindfulness
meditation, students were instructed to pay attention to their internal and external moment-by-
moment experiences with openness, curiosity, and acceptance. The control section finished each
class meeting ten minutes earlier than the mindfulness section in order to make their class content
equivalent except for the mindfulness intervention, that was omitted.

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Impact of Mindful Awareness Practices

Measures
Psychological well-being. Assessment of mindfulness traits was accomplished with the Freiburg
Mindfulness Inventory (FMI: Buchheld, Grossman, & Walach, 2001) and the Mindful Attention
Awareness Scale (MAAS: Brown & Ryan, 2003), both administered pre- and post-intervention. Self-
compassion was measured with the Self-Compassion Scale (SCS: Neff, 2003). Rumination was
assessed with the 12-item rumination subscale of the Rumination-Reflection Questionnaire (RRQ:
Trapnell & Campbell, 1999). Perceived stress was measured with a 14-item version of the Perceived
Stress Scale (PSS: Cohen, Kamarck, & Mermelstein, 1983). To assess anxiety level, the State Trait
Anxiety Inventory (STAI: Spielberger, Gorsuch, Lushene, Vagg, & Jacobs, 1983) was employed.

Sense of capacity for learning in the classroom. At post-intervention, students in the mindful group
were asked to answer a questionnaire (Evaluation of Mindful Awareness Practices: EMAP;
available from authors) developed for this study to measure the subjective sense students had of
the impact of MAPs on their learning experience.

Learning outcomes. Objective learning outcomes in the classroom were assessed using students’
scores on each of the three multiple-choice 50-question exams (worth 100 points each)
administered throughout the semester and the total points students earned for the class, which was
based on their exam scores, several writing assignments, and structured peer evaluations (total
possible points = 500). During the whole 15-week semester, the students had eight mindfulness
practice sessions before the first exam (administered in the fifth week), 17 sessions in advance of the
second class exam (ninth week), and 29 sessions before the third class exam (15th week).

Results
Sample demographics for mindfulness (n = 37) and control (n = 23) groups revealed that groups did
not differ with respect to ethnicity, self-reported GPA (grade point average), or the existence of
prior MAPs experiences. The chi-square statistic to compare the samples with respect to gender
approached significance (χ2(1, N = 60) = 3.54, p = .060), indicating that the mindfulness group
consisted of more male students (35%) than the control group did (13%). The participants in the
control group were significantly older than those in the mindfulness group (t(58) = 3.54, p < .01),
and there were more students in their fourth year of college (senior students) in the control group,
compared with the mindfulness group (χ2(1, N = 60) = 6.347, p < .05).
It was proposed that a MAP incorporated in the classroom would produce higher learning
outcomes among the students. In the present study, scores on three class exams and total class
score were used as objective indicators of student learning outcomes. Difference scores were
calculated by subtracting student scores at the third exam from those at the first exam.
The total mean points for the class were higher in the mindfulness group (M = 431.4, SD =
34.6) than in the control group (M = 414.5, SD = 65.9), but the differences were not statistically
significant (F(1, 58) = 1.69, p = .199). Average exam scores for the first, second and third exam for
the mindfulness group were 84.3 (SD = 9.9), 79.7 (SD = 10.2), and 84.8 (SD = 10.0), compared with
the control group exam scores of 85.6 (SD = 8.8), 79.9 (SD = 9.7), and 83.4 (SD = 10.4), respectively.
One-way analyses of variance (ANOVAs) found no significant differences between the two groups’
individual exam scores at times 1, 2 and 3, nor were any group differences found for the difference
score from the first to the third exam.
It was also expected that students’ state of mindfulness (measured by FMI and MAAS) could
be enhanced through their practice of mindfulness meditation in the classroom and that
mindfulness practices would increase a student’s self-compassion (SCS scores), and reduce
ruminative thinking (RRQ), perceived stress (PSS), and state and trait anxiety (STAI). Difference
scores were computed by subtracting students’ scores at post-intervention from those at pre-
intervention. One-way analyses of covariance (ANCOVAs) were conducted to compare difference
scores between the two groups, controlling for the possible effects of age, gender and college rank
(i.e., these three variables were added as covariates). Results are shown in Table 1.
The ANCOVA yielded a significant difference between the two groups for FMI difference
scores (F(1, 55) = 2.13, p < .05). Two additional one-way ANOVAs (within subjects) indicated that

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Kiyomi Yamada & Tara L. Victor

students in the mindfulness group demonstrated a significant increase in mean FMI scores (F(1,36)
= 9.445, p < .01), whereas there was no significant difference between pre- and post-intervention
for the control group (F(1, 22) = .000, p = 1.00). The one-way ANCOVA also found that the group
difference between RRQ difference scores was significant (F(1,55) = 5.389, p < .05). Additional one-
way ANOVAs indicated that rumination scores significantly decreased in the mindfulness group
(F(1, 36) = 4.53, p < .05), while a significant increase was shown in the control group (F(1, 22) =
5.55, p < .05).

Table 1. Adjusted pre- and post-intervention means (SE) and difference scores (percentage
of changes) for the Mindfulness and Control groups and results of analyses of covariance.

Dependent Mindfulness (n = 37) Control (n = 23) F value p

variables (ANCOVA,
df = 1)
Pre- and post- Difference Pre- and post- Difference
intervention score (% intervention score (%
mean (SE) change) mean (SE) change)
FMI 36.6 (1.2) 3.23 37.6 (1.5) -0.25 2.127 .038*
39.9 (1.3) (+8.8%) 37.4 (1.7) (-0.7%)
MAAS 60.2 (2.2) -0.05 59.8 (2.9) -2.35 0.455 .503
60.1 (2.6) (-.09%) 57.5 (3.5) (-3.9%)
SCS 3.01 (0.05) 0.37 3.17 (0.07) -0.02 2.030 .160
3.38 (0.14) (+12.2%) 3.15 (0.18) (-.08%)
RRQ 3.44 (0.13) -0.16 3.22 (0.17) 0.25 5.389 .024*
3.28 (0.14) (-4.7%) 3.46 (0.18) (+7.7%)
PSS 26.2 (1.4) -1.67 25.1 (1.8) 0.82 -1.155 .287
24.5 (1.5) (-6.4%) 25.9 (1.9) (+3.3%)
STAI-SA 40.5 (2.0) -1.81 37.0 (2.7) 7.08 5.795 .019*
38.7 (2.4) (-4.5%) 44.1 (3.2) (+19.1%)
STAI-TA 41.6 (1.8) -1.75 38.2 (2.4) 2.60 2.055 .157
39.9 (2.0) (-4.2%) 40.8 (2.7) (+6.8%)

Finally, the results of the ANCOVA showed that there was a significant effect of group for the state
anxiety (STAI_SA) difference scores (F(1, 55) = 5.61, p < .05). The descriptive data indicated that a
reduction in the state anxiety scores was observed in the mindfulness group, compared with an
increase in the control group. Results of additional analyses revealed the difference in the state
anxiety scores between pre- and post-intervention for the mindfulness group was not statistically
significant (F(1, 36) = 0.02, p = .829), but the difference approached significance for the control
group (F(1, 22) = 3.58, p = .072).
Finally, at post-intervention, participants in the mindfulness group (n = 37) completed the
EMAP questionnaire designed to gauge students’ subjective sense of the impact of MAPs on their
learning experience. Over 70% of the participants ‘strongly agreed’ or ‘agreed’ that MAPs helped
them: ‘decrease tension in my body’, ‘become more aware of myself or my body’, ‘become more
aware of the importance of taking care of myself in order to learn’, ‘cultivate a peaceful
mind/calmness’, and ‘improve my ability to listen attentively’. In addition, over 81% of the
students in the mindfulness group either ‘strongly agreed’ or ‘agreed’ that the MAPs ‘contributed to a
positive learning environment’ and ‘are an appropriate use of class time’. Interestingly, of the 97%
students who responded to an open-ended question assessing their experience with mindfulness in
the classroom, 61% reported that MAPs had a positive impact on their daily life beyond the
classroom, such as ‘releasing stress’, ‘feeling inner peace’, ‘becoming more aware of one’s thoughts
and surroundings’, ‘feeling more in control of things’, ‘focusing on each task at hand’, ‘having a
better attitude around others’, and ‘starting to take better care of oneself’. One of those students
highlighted the utility of MAPs by stating that ‘MAPs is a technique and idea I will carry on with
me for the rest of my life’.

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Impact of Mindful Awareness Practices

Discussion
The present study was a novel, preliminary attempt to investigate empirically the effects of
mindfulness meditation incorporated into the college classroom on student learning outcomes,
using quantitative and objective measures. Expected secondary outcomes included a decrease in
perceived levels of stress, greater self-compassion, and less ruminative thinking, state and trait
anxiety.
The results from this non-randomised but controlled study indicated that a 10-minute mindful
awareness practice (MAP) was feasibly introduced in the context of a higher educational setting,
and that it was associated with the cultivation of mindfulness traits, as well as lower levels of
rumination and state anxiety. Although it was expected that MAPs could improve student learning
outcomes, the present study did not obtain empirical support for this assertion. Statistical analyses
revealed that there were no statistically significant differences between the mindfulness and control
groups on the students’ class exam scores, total scores, and difference scores from the first to third
class exam. This is in spite of the fact that students perceived that they had benefited from MAPs
incorporated in the classroom. It is noted that the dissociation between what study participants
perceived and how they performed has been found in other areas of research, especially in the area
of cognition. For example, literature has demonstrated that there is little relationship between
subjective confidence measures and objective performance in terms of some cognitive tasks such as
memory accuracy and visual perception (e.g., Wilimzig, Tsuchiya, Fahle, Einhüser, & Koch, 2008).
Further investigation is needed to examine this possibility.
The lack of a statistically significant difference in learning outcomes could be the result of the
measures used in this study. Class exam scores and total points for the class might not accurately or
appropriately capture aspects of the learning process that benefited from MAPs. Another possible
reason for failing to find a group difference involves the relatively small sample size, which of
course reduces statistical power. Third, a limitation in adjusting outcome scores in terms of
possible confounding variables (e.g., age, gender, college rank) could affect the results of group
comparisons. Lastly, these findings clearly require further investigation in larger, randomised
samples.
Previous investigations have examined the impact of MBSR extracurricular programmes on
medical, nursing, and mental health graduate students (e.g., Jain et al., 2007; Rosenzweig et al.,
2003) or they have held an entire for-credit class on mindfulness, which may not be realistic for
broad implementation in some school settings. Our findings are encouraging, as they suggest that
even a small amount of exposure can have important benefits. Further, while previous studies in
college settings included self-selected students (suggesting the possibility that they may have started
with greater motivation or interest in mindfulness), participants in the current study enrolled in
their regular class without prior information about the inclusion of MAPs. Thus, this study
supports the perspective that MAPs could have a positive impact not only on those who are
interested in mindfulness practices, but also on a broader range of college students without prior
experience or exposure to mindfulness.

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KIYOMI YAMADA* is an Assistant Teacher and Child Counselor at the Suika Education Inc. in
Torrance, California. She has also been working as a Registered Therapist Intern (IMFT) with
various mental health agencies including Pacific Clinics in Santa Fe Springs, Harbor Area
Counseling Services in San Pedro, and Asian American Drug Abuse Program in Los Angeles,
California. As an international student, she recently graduated from the Masters program in
Clinical Psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hills. Ms Yamada’s primary research
and teaching interests are in complementary and alternative educational practices. Correspondence:
[email protected]

TARA L. VICTOR is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at California State

University, Dominguez Hills. She is also an Assistant Clinical Professor in the Department of
Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Clinical
Neuropsychologist in the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at the Greater Los
Angeles Veterans Healthcare System. Her primary research interest is in the field of
neuropsychology. Her primary teaching interest is in the utility of complementary and alternative
educational practices. Correspondence: [email protected]

*Contact author

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