Development and psychometric properties of the Self-efficacy for Mindfulness Meditation Practice scale

The influences of mindfulness on high-stakes mathematics test achievement of middle school students

Research has shown that mindfulness can reduce students' negative emotions associated with high-stakes tests and thereby improve test performance. This study explored the association between mindfulness-based intervention (MBI) and high-risk math test scores of middle school students, which is noticeably slim in the domain of mathematics education, through a mediating process involving math-specific test anxiety and math self-efficacy. Using data from a sample of 45 students, age 12-13, we found empirical support for a significant positive correlation between mindfulness and middle school students' math achievement. Participants listened to a mindfulness audio every other week before a mathematics test. Weekly mathematics test scores, student group discussion data, and in-depth interview data were analyzed to explore how mindfulness affected students' mathematics test performance, which showed a statistically significant improvement after mindfulness compared to mathematics achievement without the intervention. Our results indicate that mindfulness can relieve mathematics anxiety symptoms, including physiological manifestations, test-unrelated thinking and worries, and problem-solving obstacles caused by mathematics anxiety. Also, mindfulness, especially its non-judgmental attitude, positively affects students' mathematical self-efficacy. The current research provides evidence of the mindfulness intervention's efficacy for improving middle school mathematics test performance but also identifies the complexities of implementing it with large numbers of students.

The lived experience of Buddhist-oriented religious coping in late life: Buddhism as a cognitive schema

This article explores how older Buddhists in Singapore use Buddhist beliefs and practices to cope with stress. Semi-structured interviews with six older Buddhists were conducted. Interview transcripts were analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. Data analysis identified three ways of Buddhist-oriented religious coping: meaning-making coping, meditative coping, and ego-transcendence coping. In meaning-making coping, participants employed the notions of karma and duḥkha to make sense of stress. Participants’ meditative coping methods included visualization and mantra meditation. During ego-transcendence coping, participants drew on the notion of non-attachment to the ego. The three ways of Buddhist-oriented religious coping can be examined in a Buddhism-as-cognitive-schema perspective.