Questões de Concurso

Schools of thought: can mindfulness lessons boost child mental health?

Children are taking 10 minutes out from the hurly burly school day to reflect on their thoughts and their feelings. Some ground themselves by thinking about their feet on the floor, while others concentrate on their breathing.

This is mindfulness, the lessons quickly growing in popularity as an antidote to the stress of being a young person in the 21st century, be it pressure to perform in exams, social media, or the obsession with body image that is reported to even affect primary age children.

Children are learning about their brains and how to deal with unruly thoughts – to control emotions such as anger and fear. It is no longer head, shoulders, knees and toes, but amygdala, hippocampus and pre-frontal cortex.

The most recent NHS survey of young people’s mental health in 2017 shows one-in-eight 5- to 19-year-olds in England has a diagnosable mental health condition. Hospital admissions for anorexia alone more than doubled in the eight years to 2017/18.

Stress is a known barrier to learning and a growing number of schools are targeting the emotional health of pupils through schemes such as meditation, mindfulness and the provision of mental health first aiders and buddies.

The Mental Health Foundation charity wants emotional wellbeing to be at the heart of the school curriculum, and has chosen body image as the key theme of this year’s Mental Health Awareness Week. Dr Antonis Kousoulis, its assistant director, said its survey last year found 47% of people aged 18-24 had experienced stress over their body image to the extent of being overwhelmed or unable to cope. “Social media has certainly played a part, ” he says. “Historically, it was the mirror that was the main driver of perception of our image and how we thought others perceived us. Nowadays, young people are exposed almost on a 24/7 basis to manipulated and heavily edited images, whether that’s in advertising or photos of their friends.”

Over the past five years there has been a proliferation of mindfulness organisations and companies selling lesson plans and staff training to schools. But does it work?

Secondary school teacher Richard Burnett, who founded the Mindfulness in Schools Project 10 years ago, warns against “quick fix” approaches. “We are a charity started by teachers who wanted to teach children how best to manage their thoughts and feelings and deal with the rollercoaster of being a young person, ” he says.

It has two training courses for teachers – one aimed at secondary students and another for younger classes. “It’s about training your attention to notice what is going on. If you are aware of that, you can choose how to respond, for example to manage the amygdala, the part of the brain that detects fear and prepares a response, ” he says.

Emotional disorders are on the rise, and we should instil something in our children and young people about coping with stress, advises Lee Hudson, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health’s mental health lead. But should it be mindfulness? There is evidence that the process can bring benefits to adults, he says. “[But] the evidence for its effectiveness with children is not yet sufficiently robust and we need more research. However, some schools are rolling it out and children seem to enjoy it – and it unlikely to cause harm.”

(Available in: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/may/16/mindfulness-lessons-child-mental-health. Accessed on May 17th,2019. Adapted.)

Characteristics of a good test

In order to judge the effectiveness of any test, it is sensible to lay down criteria against which the test can be measured, as follows:

Validity: a test is valid if it tests what it is supposed to test. Thus it is not valid, for example, to test writing ability with an essay question that demands specialist knowledge of history or biology — unless it is known that all students share this knowledge before they do the test.

A particular kind of ‘validity’ that concerns most test designers is face validity. This means that the test should look, on the ‘face’ of it, as if it is valid. A test which consisted of only three multiple choice items would not convince students of its face validity however reliable or practical teachers thought it to be.

Reliability: a good test should give consistent results. For example, if the same group of students took the same test twice within two days — without reflecting on the first test before they sat it again — they should get the same results on each occasion. If two groups who were demonstrably alike took the test, the marking range would be the same.

In practice, ‘reliability’ is enhanced by making the test instructions absolutely clear, restricting the scope for variety in the answers. Reliability also depends on the people who mark the tests. Clearly a test is unreliable if the result depends to any large extent on who is marking it. Much thought has gone into making the scoring of tests as reliable as possible.

(Jeremy Harmer. The practice of English language teaching.2007. Adaptado)