A Good Mix: Academic Performances and Meditation

In addition to helping spiritual people cope with the stress of their daily lives, transcendental meditation (TM) can apparently be used to improve academic performances among students whose results are mediocre at best. The conclusions belong to a new scientific study,

This specific kind of meditation can apparently exert its benefits on these students in a discernible manner. This means that the correlation is strong enough to be teased out via statistics.

The work was conducted by investigators at the Maharishi University of Management. The institution itself was founded by the creator of transcendental meditation, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

The study was conducted in California, on a batch of 189 students in a public middle school. The participants were selected based on their below-average scores in mathematics and English.

California Standards Tests were used to asses student performances at the beginning of the tests, and then again at the end. The differences that resulted were then analyzed, and various other factors that may have influenced the changes compensated for.

“The results of the study provide support to a recent trend in education focusing on student mind/body development for academic achievement,” explains the coauthor of the new study, Dr. Ronald Zigler.

“We need more programs of this kind implemented into our nation’s public schools, with further evaluation efforts,” the investigator adds. He says that students in the test group exhibited a significant increase in math and English scale scores.

They also showed improved performance level scores over the study period, which was one year.

It was also found that about 41 percent of the students who were asked to practice TM exhibited a significant increase of at least one performance level in math. In the control group, only 15 percent of students achieved the same performace.

“This initial research, showing the benefits of the Quiet Time/Transcendental Meditation program on academic achievement, holds promise for public education,” MUM professor of education and lead study authro Sanford Nidich, EdD, explains.

“The findings suggest that there is an easy-to-implement, value-added educational program which can help low-performing minority students begin to close the achievement gap,” he adds, quoted by PsychCentral.

Details of the new investigation appear in a research paper published in the latest issue of the journal Education.