Background: Interest in the effectiveness of mindfulness-based interventions such as yoga in primary schools has grown. Evidence shows promise, as youth who engage in yoga to promote mindfulness show improved coping skills, increased socio-emotional competence and prosocial skills, academic performance, attention span, and ability to deal with stress.
Objective: This study reports the results of a program evaluation of a universal health and wellness curriculum, Pure Power, designed to teach youth yoga techniques, mindfulness, and emotion regulation.
Methods: A non-randomized comparison design examined outcomes among participants from schools that completed the intervention with highest fidelity of implementation (n = 461) and from students in matched comparison schools (n = 420). Standard measures of coping, emotion regulation and emotion dysregulation, spelling, and math achievement were collected.
Results: Analyses suggest the youth in the intervention schools demonstrated relative improvement on measures of emotion regulation, spelling, and math.
Conclusions: Challenges in implementation in real-life settings are vital to identify. The data provide some real-world evidence for the effectiveness of a universal health and wellness curriculum on emotion regulation and positive academic outcomes. Training school staff to deliver the intervention may foster implementation. Future research should test the effectiveness of who delivers the intervention; for example, teacher-delivered groups vs. other wellness personnel.
Copyright: © 2024 McCurdy et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.