ArticleCritique

EDPS612.03
AmandaMedland

Enhancing Preschoolers Self-Regulation Via Mindful Yoga

Methodology
Razza, Bergen-Cico, & Raymond (2015) acknowledged a deficit in the understanding of
how young children, specifically preschool aged, are effected by mindfulness based training such
as yoga interventions. The researchers collected 34 children (18 intervention, 16 control) from 2
pre-kindergarten classrooms within an urban elementary school in New York. Within the
experiment, one teacher and their classroom were assigned the intervention, while the other
teacher and their class became the control group. The intervention teacher completed a 200-hour
training program through YogaKids in order to implement a modified version of the standardized
YogaKids program. Throughout the intervention, the classroom children received about 40 hours
of mindful yoga throughout 25 weeks. The program gradually increased the length of time from
10 minutes in the fall to 30 minutes in the spring. Throughout intervention, the teacher led the
children through breathing exercise during morning circle and during transitions as well as yoga
postures in the afternoon. In order to determine its effectiveness, parents and children were both
to complete assessments pre- and post-intervention to assess self-regulation. Both children and
parents received reinforcement for the assessment to encourage completion (stickers and small
gift respectively). Parents completed the Childrens Behavior Questionnaire, while children
participated in several tasks to assess different aspects of self-regulation; the toy wrap task, toy
wait task (ability to wait), pencil-tapping task (inhibition), head shoulders knees and toes task
(behavioural regulation), and a drawing task (sustained attention).
Results
Through analytic comparison, the sample was identified as being
ethnically diverse, with 29 out of 34 recruited families completing the entire

research project. Once pre- and post-test measures were examined,

advantages for mindful yoga were seen within the pencil-tapping task,
attention impulsivity, and with the gift-wrap task. The children were also
witnessed to show improvements in inhibitory control. The researchers also
inquired into where the greatest effects were gained, and identified those
children who initially exhibited lower levels of competence presented with
the largest gains.
Conclusion
Overall, researchers identified that the implementation of the mindful
yoga program produced successful results in effortful control & executive
functioning across all of the treatment group children. Despite uncertainties
of the effects of mindfulness training for preschool aged children, this study
identified the benefits even when started at a very young age.
Critical Analysis of Strengths and Weakness
Strengths were seen within the flexibility of the program. Teachers
were able to incorporate the yoga skills learned in the training into their daily
teaching schedule and were not required to stick to strict outline. This would
allow the teachers to read the classroom and identify what would work best
for the children at which points of the day.
A weakness could also bee seen with the casual manner in which the
yoga was presented, as the lack of formalized program would reduce the
ability for replicability in the future. A second weakness that was identified
was that the results seen within the classroom were contained to that

environment and generalization was not seen to other environments. Lastly,

because the sample was chosen from full classrooms, there was no random
assignment between treatment and control, rather one classroom was
designated to each condition.
Suggestions for Improvement
Firstly, the researchers would benefit from gathering a larger sample of
children. By using an increased number of children the researchers would
gain more evidence towards the effectiveness of their intervention. Also,
even if the researchers continued to use the quasi-experimental design,
having multiple classrooms would ensure that the treatment effects were as
a result of the skills taught and not the teachers who were implementing the
program. Secondly, it would be worthwhile to complete a comparative study
to identify differences in efficacy between a standardized mindfulnesstraining program and a more flexible one such as was utilized in the current
study. Being able to identify the differences in outcomes dependent on the
program would be helpful when deciding which programs were the best fit
for a school or agency. More importantly to identify if there a significant
difference between standardized and more flexible programs or if there is
value in allowing teachers to be more flexible and incorporate it casually into
their every day teaching styles.

A Randomized Controlled Pilot Trial of Classroom-based Mindfulness

Meditation Compared to An Active Control Condition in Sixth-grade
Children
Methodology
Britton, Lepp, Niles, Rocha, Fisher, & Gold (2014) acknowledged with
the alarmingly high prevalence rate of mental disorders, that school-based
interventions in the pre-adolescent years can serve to prevent challenges in
later years. Within this, the increase in mindfulness therapies brings question
to its effectiveness when looking into mental health of youth. The current
study gathered 55 male and 46 female sixth-grade students to participate in
their randomized, controlled study. A committee whose purpose was to
create homology for aptitude, learning styles, maturity, social characteristics,
and gender divided the children into four classrooms. From this, two
classrooms were assigned to the meditation intervention, while the other 2
classrooms were an active control condition, which was a 6-week curriculum
on ancient Africian History. Each day the children within the control group
were lead through silent mediation at the start of history class. This
mediation lasted between three to twelve minutes with the length increasing
as the intervention progressed. Within the meditation teachers focused on
breath awareness, breath counting, awareness of thoughts, feelings and
sensations, and body sweeps.
Results

The study used several forms of assessment to gain their data in order
to support and dispute their hypothesis. The student acceptability of the
intervention as well as the used the Youth Self Report (YSR) to measure
wellbeing and any sub clinical symptoms of mental health concerns were
gathered. The researchers also use a modified version of the Spielberger
State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI-C) in order to gain insight into positive and
negative affect. Children also completed The Cognitive and Affective
Mindfulness Scale (CAMS-R), which identifies the ability to be mindful,
emotionally regulate and being accepting and non-judgmental. All
questionnaires were completed at the start of the intervention as well as at
the end of the 6-week intervention. Student acceptability was gauged by
analysis of journal entries after each meditation and the researchers found
that 94% of the students were engaged almost every occasion plus 92% of
the students believed there was an increase in relaxation, ability to focus or
a decrease in anxiety as a result of the meditation. The results identified that
the intervention group showed statistically significant decrease in
internalizing problems as per the YSR, as well as greater reduction in in
suicidal ideation or self-harm. An increase in positive affect was also seen,
although not at the statistically significant level. Lastly, no change in
mindfulness was found in either group.
Conclusion
The researchers found that incorporating a meditation intervention
into a standard school curriculum is feasible to teachers and administrators

and acceptable to students. It was also identified that both the meditation
and the active control group produced equal decreases in clinical symptoms,
with no differences between groups. Researchers explained the similarities
as a result of several possible aspects. Most prominently, the fact that both
interventions included novel NONDIDACTIC experiential activities could
possibly have increased attention and affect for the active control to levels
matching meditation.
Critical Analysis of Strengths, Weaknesses and Suggestions for
Improvement
Within this study, the randomization of classrooms was performed by a
coin flip, resulting in no bias surrounding who received the meditation
intervention and who did not. The study used a larger sample of children
over 2 school years, which would work to support the research, if it had
indeed identified a significant difference between the two groups, which it
did not.
A weakness of the study lies in the limited results proving the
effectiveness of mediation over other active control groups. In order to
assess the effectiveness of meditation alone, it may have been of benefit to
also include a passive no-treatment condition. This would allow the
researchers to compare not only the meditation to the active condition, but
to a group of potentially wait-listed students who received absolutely no
intervention. A second potential weakness to this study was the fact that the
same teacher taught both the meditation and the active control group.

Questions around whether the instructor was blind to the purpose of the
study arise; as this holds the potential for the teacher to subtly alter their
teaching approaches in order to sway the data. This paired with the fact that
there was no formal fidelity checks in order to assure the students were
receiving the material as designed questions the results of the study. Lastly,
the study did not look into what an effective dosage for children would be in
regards to meditation. Future studies would also benefit from comparing
shorter to longer periods of meditation intervention and insight into how that
affects the mental health of the children. Overall, the study created a
foundation for future researches by identifying strengths and weaknesses,
which should be considered for those looking to gain more information on the
effects of meditation with school-aged children.

References
Britton, W.B., Lepp, N.E., Niles, H.F., Rocha, T., Fisher, N.E., & Gold J.S. (2014).
A randomized controlled pilot trial of classroom-based mindfulness
meditation compared to an active control condition in sixth-grade
children. Journal of School Psychology, 52, 260-278. doi:
10.1016/j,jsp.2014.03.002
Razza, R.A., Bergen-Cico, D., & Raymond, K. (2015). Enhancing Preschoolers
Self-Regulation Via Mindful Yoga. Journal of Child and Family Studies,
24, 372-385. doi:10.1007/s10826-013-9847-6