Mindfulness in Education

Mindfulness is an overarching concept for guiding research in education and psychology. After providing examples of learned mindlessness, introducing the distinction between situational and dispositional mindfulness and summarizing some classical studies, the main body of the chapter discusses research that did not explicitly test mindfulness theory but could be subsumed under this concept. A selective review of findings from research on variability of learning materials, problem-based learning, effects of rendering learning materials difficult, and three different interventions to increase interest (relevance intervention, example choice, personalization) demonstrate the wide-ranging applications of the concept of mindfulness. An apparent challenge to mindfulness theory is cognitive load theory. However, research has found that cognitive load harms learning when it does not contribute to the integration of materials. By contrast, when cognitive load opens opportunities to connect contents and to process them mindfully, learning benefits outweigh the costs of higher processing load. A final section shows that the mindfulness concept is relevant not only for traditional school subjects but also for political education, art education, and creativity.