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Cultivating Mindfulness with Third Grade Students via Classroom-Based Interventions

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Abstract

Forty-five third grade students, from six different classrooms at a local elementary school, participated in our 3-year study. We delivered three 30-min classroom lessons on mindfulness using a curriculum that included modified lessons from the Mindful Schools and MindUp curricula as well as material we developed. We also provided booster sessions for the same students in fourth and fifth grades. Classroom teachers from the participating classrooms as well as the students anonymously shared comments about their experiences. Students were given two measures. These measures included the Mindful Student Questionnaire (MSQ; Renshaw and O’Malley 2014) and the Positive Experiences at School Scale (Furlong et al. Child Indicators Research, 6, 753–775, 2013). This article describes the intervention used and reports the findings from the analysis of quantitative and qualitative data. Related to the classroom experience, 100% of teacher comments were favorable. Intervention: Qualitative comments from students were positive. Quantitative results indicate that mindfulness scores did not increase.

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Correspondence to Michele Kielty.

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Funding

Portions of this study were funded by the Educational Foundation of Madison County Schools, Virginia.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

Ethical Approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional research committee, with consent from the cooperating public schools and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed Consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Kielty, M., Gilligan, T., Staton, R. et al. Cultivating Mindfulness with Third Grade Students via Classroom-Based Interventions. Contemp School Psychol 21, 317–322 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40688-017-0149-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40688-017-0149-7

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