The Effect of Mindfulness Training on Cognitive Flexibility in Sixth-grade Female Students

1. Ph.D. student in Psychology, Faculty of Education and Psychology, Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz, Ahvaz, Iran 2. Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Education and Psychology, Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz, Ahvaz, Iran, *Corresponding author email: ghmaktabi@scu.ac.ir 3. Professor, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Education and Psychology, Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz, Ahvaz, Iran 4. Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Education and Psychology, Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz, Ahvaz, Iran Introduction Each country’s ministry of education plays a significant role in the individual and social behavior of the people in society. In fact, the educational activities of any country can be considered as the investment of a generation for other generations, the goal of which is human development. In other words, the purpose of educational activities is the growth of human awareness and potential (Arjomand Siahpoosh, Moghaddas Jafari, & Farboghlani, 2011). One of the important goals of education is to address the recognition of the students’ personalities and help them to make academic progress in various subjects. Accordingly, in the research conducted in educational psychology, cognitive variables related to academic achievement have been widely studied (Deary, Strand, Smith, & Fernandes, 2007). Students’ cognitive abilities, which are primarily a by-product of education, are practiced over time both in and out of the classroom and grow naturally (Moser-Mercer, 2010). In recent years, interest in the psychological effects of mindfulness training has increased significantly, and new evidence suggests that mindfulness has positive effects on cognitive (Chiesa & Malinowski, 2011) and emotional processes (Goldin & Gross, 2010). Mindfulness is a type of treatment that is increasingly being used. This treatment is a particular type of short-term and immediate treatment that motivates people who Abstract: The study was conducted to determine the effect of mindfulness training on cognitive flexibility in sixth-grade female students. This research used a pretest-posttest study with control group. A multi-stage random sampling was used in 4 schools, among which 37 sixth-grade female students were randomly selected and assigned to two experimental (17 students) and control groups (20 students). Students in the experimental group participated in a mindfulness training course for 12 (120-minute) sessions for a month and a half. The study used Dennis and Vander Wal’s Cognitive Flexibility Inventory (2010). The results of covariance analysis showed that there was a significant difference between the two groups in the scores of cognitive flexibility and due to the higher mean scores of the cognitive flexibility of the experimental group in the posttest (p> 0.05, p = 10.25), it can be stated that mindfulness training was effective in increasing students’ cognitive flexibility.