Anyone who’s ever spent time on a university campus would probably agree, there’s plenty there to distract a young college student.
Since academic success relies heavily on a student’s ability to sustain focus over the course of a semester, those having any kind of attention deficit can find the college experience especially challenging.
That’s why I was excited to read about a recent study conducted at the University of Miami that looked at how Mindfulness Training (MT) might reduce mind wandering among college students and enhance their working memory.
For this study, researchers assigned students to a 7-week mindfulness training interval or wait-list control group. All participants were tested, both before and after the study, using the sustained attention to response task (SART) instrument as well as two measures for evaluating working memory.
Those students in the MT program participated in instructor-led sessions based on content modeled on John Kabat-Zinn, PhD’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) concepts. They also participated in supervised practice sessions.
So what did researchers find?
At the end of the 7-week session, those who had participated in the Mindfulness Training program showed greater sustained attention task performance and lower self-reported mind-wandering when attempting to complete tasks, as compared to the control group.
The researchers did not, however, see significant working-memory performance following the short-term MT experience.
There were some limitations to this study, however, including the semi-random assignment of subjects to control groups. Although all participants in the MT program were chosen from the same group of volunteers, a non-random variable was introduced as researchers had to take student schedules into account when making assignments.
Still, this is an encouraging study for those of us interested in the potential benefits of mindfulness practice within not only the field of education, but in every area of life.
If you’re interested in reading more about this study, it was published in the January 2014 issue of Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
And, if you’d like to know more about how mindfulness could help you become more focused and present in everyday life, I hope you’ll check out our courses on mindfulness. There are features of Jack Kornfield, PhD, one of the world’s most beloved mindfulness teachers.
I’m curious – where are you seeing the growing conversation about mindfulness take place? Where you work? On a campus? Please tell me about it in the comments below.
I would like to see more of this.
Giving tools for focus and concentration could change our culture. Absolutely Mindfulness Should be a part of High School curriculum. Like CPR. Like Teaching assertiveness. As knowing what Alanon and AA are when teaching about Drug and Alcohol use.
Our culture tends to teach to the distractability of youth. They include movies/videos in much of the curriculum in schools. If you’ve ever Read any of Malcolm Gladwell he includes how even Sesame Street has appraised attention. We rarely give youth tools for focus and concentration. Then we take away recess and they ride on a bus to school omitting physical outlets.
Teaching Mindfulness gives a tool.
Your post is relay nice and i get more information about Mindfulness and Distracted benefits.
I am a Yoga teacher in New Zealand, and I am seeing “mindfulness” in advertising for Yoga classes and courses where before the word “meditation” would have been used.
I am a trained Satyananda Yoga teacher, and in our practices there are cross overs with mindfulness, Antar Mouna being a major one. Here students are guided to observe thoughts, and analyse chosen thoughts, then let them go totally. There are many other practices that share principles bt we call them meditation.
Jenny
Thank you for this information. Antar Mouna sounds like a wonderful process for depressed people — to help them stop dwelling on negative thoughts. Various methods of mind control are effective for younger clients, but for older people who have an ingrained pattern of negative thinking, your techniques might bring new hope. I live in Central Virginia. Do you know of any place near me where Antar Mouna is taught?
I am also guessing that removing mobile phones and social media for a week would improve everyone’s concentration scores/ability.
A full link to the study would have been appreciated…
Does concentrating in lectures not help improve concentration ability as well?
I work in the Student Counselling Centre at Dalhousie University. I regularly recommend mindfulness and meditation training to my clients. I also practice with them in the session from time to time. We run mindfulness drop in groups twice a week during the Fall and Winter Semesters. Finally, there are increasingly more opportunities for mindfulness training in the city of Halifax. In my view, active meditation practice helps concentration and improves academic performance as well as many other po9sitive benefits!