Mindfulness for Students in Pre-K to Secondary School Settings: Current Findings, Future Directions

This special section includes a series of papers that envision the next generation of research on school-based mindfulness programming (SBMP) for students ages 4–18 years. In the first paper, Roeser et al (Mindfulness 13, 2022b) summarize the current evidence of SBMPs, as well as limitations and critiques of this work. Based on their review, they propose improving experimental research and incorporating diverse theories and methods in future research that go “beyond all splits” towards a non-dualistic and relationally, culturally, contextually, ethically, and developmentally grounded science on mindfulness and compassion for students in schools. In a second paper, Baelen et al. (Mindfulness 13, 2022) describe a framework to enhance the consistency and completeness in implementation reporting in experimental research on SBMPs for students in order to increase our ability to draw causal inferences about the range of implementation elements that might explain program impacts on students of different ages and backgrounds in a diverse array of school contexts, and to support replication efforts and translation of research to practice. In a third paper, Felver et al. (Mindfulness 13, 2022) utilize the Delphi consensus methodology with thought leaders involved in mindfulness practice and research to identify core components of mindfulness-based programming for youth that may inform future research and applied work. Commentaries on the first two papers follow.