Meta-emotive intelligence, mindfulness and scholastic learning: A treatment study.

This study, arising from the cooperation between different educational workers (researchers, educators, teachers, experts) is aimed at analysing the use of innovative methodologies for socio-emotive teaching/learning and its effects on student learning. To this aim, an original training named "Meta-emotive intelligence and mindfulness: monitoring by mobile devices" is being delivered to a group of 51 students at a lower secondary school in Palermo. The training uses methods coming from the Buddhist tradition, such as yoga and mindfulness, as well as methods taken from the REBT - Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy - (Ellis, 1962) and from the literature about Emotional Intelligence (Mayer & Salovey, 1997). Thus, the training is performed using both traditional methods (relaxation exercises, focus groups) as well as using ICT such as educational software (D'Amico and De Caro, 2008) and applications running on mobile devices (Chifari and Merlo, 2011) to foster the self-monitoring of students' emotional states. The effectiveness of the training will be assessed through a quasi-experimental test/treatment/retest design, involving two experimental groups and a control group. The experimental group is composed of two classes at lower secondary school which participated in the mindfulness and meta-emotive intelligence training. The control group is composed of a class of the same scholastic level, that has been involved only in test and retest phase. The tests used in the test-retest phases are: the IE-ACCME: Intelligenza Emotiva: Abilità, Credenze e Concetto di sé Meta-Emotivo (D'Amico, in press) to evaluate the emotional intelligence; the PML: Prove Memoria di Lavoro (D'Amico & Lipari, in press) to assess Working Memory; the MT (Cornoldi & Colpo, 1995) and the SPM: Soluzione Problemi Matematici (Lucangeli, Tressoldi and Cendron, 2003) tests, to assess reading comprehension and arithmetical problem solving abilities. Besides, teachers' marks and data on students' behavior during lessons (perseverance, attention, organization, and anxiety) are collected. We expect the experimental groups to show an improvement in their performance in the field of emotive intelligence, emotive self-regulation, attention, concentration and working memory. We also hypothesize that, in turn, these improvements will lead to an enhancement of school achievement. The final results of the study, currently under development, will be discussed. The study, included in the Project "Edutainment: education and entertainment in experiential learning labs" (http://edutainment.pa.itd.cnr.it), has been funded by Assessorato Regionale Istruzione e Formazione Professionale - Sicilia - and promoted by MIUR, Agenzia Nazionale per lo Sviluppo dell'Autonomia Scolastica - Sicilia (ANSAS). Other partners are: Dipartimento di Psicologia, Palermo; Istituto per le Tecnologie Didattiche, CNR, Palermo; Istituto Comprensivo Michelangelo Buonarroti, Palermo; Children's museum BIMPA, Palermo.