A Qualitative Microanalysis of the Immediate Behavioural Effects of Mindfulness Practices on Students’ Self-Regulation and Attention

The study examined the immediate effects of mindfulness practices on students’ attention and self-regulation during mathematical problem-solving tasks. Participants were 15 4th-grade Finnish students and their teacher. Data were collected during six study sessions of mathematical problem-solving, with and without mindfulness practices. The sessions were video-recorded, and children responded to the Freiburg mindfulness inventory and the cognitive and affective mindfulness scale-revised. A qualitative video micro-analysis focused on coding the observable behaviours related to attention and self-regulation. Self-report instruments were scored and tabulated for comparison. The findings indicate microbehavioural changes indicating positive effects of mindfulness practices on students’ self-regulation, with higher signs of engagement and lower signs of disengagement after mindfulness practices. This study enlightens the use of mindfulness practices in school routines and discusses the impacts of these practices while evidencing that future research on the topic is needed.


Introduction
Mindfulness covers a large range of practices and traditions developed for various objectives and contexts (Lutz et al., 2007(Lutz et al., , 2008)).The term is broadly used to characterise exercises involving focusing, sustaining, regulating, and directing attention (Bishop et al., 2004), which allows one's awareness of the present moment and the unfolding of their bodily experiences in the format of senses, feelings, and thoughts without judgement (Kabat-Zinn, 2003;Kane, 2018).It is "a flexible state of mind in which we are actively engaged in the present, noticing new things and being sensitive to context" (Langer, 2000, p. 220).

Mindfulness Practices in the School Context
In schools, mindfulness was initially introduced as contemplative practices such as breathing, listening, noticing, and walking with focus and attention (Kane, 2018).In the Finnish context, such practices have been only informally introduced in schools, mainly as experimental projects or individual initiatives of teachers and educational psychologists.However, mindfulness-based interventions (MBI) are increasing exponentially (Carsley et al., 2018;Meiklejohn et al., 2012;Nieminen et al., 2016;Semple et al., 2017;Zenner et al., 2014), showing potential to support teachers to promote self-care (Volanen et al., 2016) and social-emotional skills (Fowelin, 2014), as well as to improve attentional self-regulation in adult-child interactions (Felver et al., 2017).
Most of the studies have adopted a quantitative approach (Leyland et al., 2019) and addressed long-term (12 months) mindfulness interventions, associating those with higher improvement in self-regulation and prosocial behaviours (Bishop et al., 2004;Black & Fernando, 2014;Schonert-Reichl & Lawlor, 2010;Parker et al., 2013;Zenner et al., 2014), and fewer signs of hyperactive and anxiety behaviours 1 3 Trends in Psychology (2023) 31:641-664 (Flook et al., 2015;Viglas, 2018).Mindfulness has a positive impact on behavioural regulation and meta-cognition in children aged 7-9 years (Flook et al., 2010), improves self-awareness and control (Raffone et al., 2010), and appears to be effective in reducing stress levels, exam tension, and behavioural problems in 8-12-yearold children (Van de Weijer-Bergsma et al., 2014;Napoli et al., 2005), generally impacting on students' mental health and well-being (Carsley et al., 2018;Volanen et al., 2020).According to Jha and colleagues (2007), mindfulness training may impact attention-related behavioural responses, enhancing them by improving functional elements of sub-components of attention.Under this understanding, attention is called to two relevant processes that can be directly impacted by mindfulness practices and that have a direct implication on students' learning in school: self-regulation and distributed attention.

The Relevance of Self-regulation and Attention in Children's Learning
Self-regulation and attention are key elements in children's learning (Ursache et al., 2012;McClelland & Cameron, 2012).Self-regulation is a multidimensional construct that regulates emotions, behaviour, and cognition (McClelland et al., 2010).It refers to the capability of controlling or directing one's attention, emotions, thinking processes, and actions (McClelland & Cameron, 2011), involving behavioural and cognitive processes (Liew, 2012).Self-regulation positively affects children's engagement in learning (Blair & Raver, 2015), improves readiness to start school (Blair & Diamond, 2008), and impacts students' learning outcomes (Ursache et al., 2012;McClelland & Cameron, 2012), as well as their emotional and social competence (Liew 2012;Riggs et al., 2006).On the other hand, difficulties in self-regulating have been positively correlated to behavioural and emotional distress in social situations, which can be often identified as a lack of attention and inhibitory control (Diamond, 2005;Semrud-Clikeman & Schafer, 2000).The persistence of difficulties related to self-regulation may negatively affect the child's ability to learn to cope with stress and frustration (Semrud-Clikeman & Schafer, 2000).
Attention can be defined as a state which is accessed in a clear form with focalization, consciousness, and concentration (James, 1980): a physiological process used to control the mind during the processing the of information (Eriksen & Yeh, 1985), or as a group of domain-specific processes rather than one monolithic process (Arciniegas et al., 2013).Attention can operate across very many different functional levels, starting from acting as a gating system that allows us to be efficient in selecting what incoming stimuli we process and what we ignore (Arciniegas et al., 2013;Cullum, 2010) to the participation in different levels of awareness (Raffone et al., 2010;Treisman, 2006).The ability to pay attention, attend, and exercise cognitive control is a vital aspect of humans' coupling in the environment and is especially important when learning something new.
The impacts of mindfulness strategies on self-regulation and attention have been studied progressively.Multiple mindfulness-based programmes have been designed for educational settings to meet the need for effective strategies in the classroom (Meiklejohn et al., 2012), with several studies evidencing the positive impact on self-regulation (Black & Fernando, 2014;Flook et al., 2015).Although there has been considerable evidence pointing to the benefits of mindfulness practices, it is important to consider the limitations in this field of research, such as those related to individual differences (Farias & Wikholm, 2016), the quality of the studies in the field (Leyland et al., 2019), and the need for broadening methodological approaches and designing studies that are more approachable for professionals working in the field (Zenner et al., 2014).For example, most of the studies rely on either selfreported data (e.g., questionnaires and scales) collected during or after long-term mindfulness interventions or physiological measures requiring sophisticated instruments and analysis unavailable to teachers and other educational professionals.Qualitative approaches using behavioural data are scarce, evidencing essential gaps in this field of study (Zenner et al., 2014).

The Contributions of Embodied Cognition to Understanding the Effects of Mindfulness Practices
Mindfulness practices gained momentum with the advancements in the field of embodied cognition: a theoretical framework that challenges the body-mind dualism present in traditional cognitivist approaches and introduces the idea that the mind must be understood in its relation to a physical body that interacts with the world-a mind embedded in the body (Gallagher, 2005(Gallagher, , 2011;;Wilson, 2002).
The embodiment can be explained from models that recognise sensorimotor systems as being part of multiple ways to understand cognition and its processes (for a detailed overview, see Kiverstein & Clark, 2009;Borghi & Cimatti, 2010;Borghi & Caruana, 2015) or from a more radical perspective in which cognition not only involves but also is dependent on the body.Despite the variation in degree, the common point in this theoretical approach is that cognition is actively interacting with the environment through the whole body-mind system and is not only centralised, abstract, and distinct from external inputs and outputs adopted by cognitivist approaches (Kosmas & Zaphiris, 2018;Wilson, 2002).The brain is connected to the environment only through the body, and it is acknowledged that the physical body, when interacting with/in the world, can change how people feel, think, and act (Borghi & Cimatti, 2010;Davis & Markman, 2012).
Embodied perspectives of learning ground investigations that focus on how learning is affected by or dependent on bodily engagements and actions and can explore many different aspects of such a process.For example, studies have shown positive effects on children's learning outcomes when learning materials and activities involve the use of body movements and actions (Kosmas et al., 2019) or how the body-object interactions are relevant to children's language processing (Wellsby & Pexman, 2014).The interdisciplinary nature of the studies provides some thoughtprovoking recommendations to improve educational practices based on raising the students' awareness of how their experiences, thoughts, feelings, and emotions are involved in the process of knowledge construction (Fugate et al., 2019;Shapiro & Stolz, 2019).Within this perspective, mindful attention facilitates cognition and learning (Munro, 2018); thus, a curriculum that applies learning strategies 1 3 Trends in Psychology (2023) 31:641-664 incorporating physical awareness, environmental and social engagement, and knowledge, which is precisely what mindfulness practices entail, would improve students' overall experience in school.But what does it mean to understand the effects of mindfulness practices through the lenses of embodied cognition?
The overall ideas of embodiment and mindfulness are interconnected (Kabat-Zinn, 2003), and understanding the effects of mindfulness practices through this perspective means focusing on the transitions, changes, and different engagements that the body can produce in its interaction with the world after being aware of its functions and existence.Practising mindfulness is a bodily experience, an embodied state of being that demands the maintenance of awareness of oneself, directing attention toward being in the body rather than objectifying or judging the body (Stephen et al., 2018).Therefore, to understand the effects of mindfulness practices, it is necessary to look at the transformations in the relationships that individuals establish with the environment through their bodies.
In the present study, we explored the behavioural cues of the immediate effects of mindfulness practices, particularly the changes in behaviours depicting self-regulation and students' attention distribution in natural learning situations.Unlike experimental studies that isolate mindfulness practices as a variable using control groups (e.g., Peixoto et al., 2022), in this study, students are compared to themselves in sessions that accompany mindfulness activities and those without.The behavioural differences are interpreted as signs of the effect of each mindfulness activity as a separate event.To guide the study, we asked: What behavioural effects do the mindfulness activities prior to study sessions have on the student's self-regulation and attention processes?
It was expected that students would express more self-regulatory behaviours and attention towards the task during study sessions carried out after mindfulness activities in comparison to those without.This hypothesis is aligned with the idea that mindfulness practices increase the capability to maintain engagement of self-regulatory neural circuits, which enhances sustained attention and the regulation of emotions (Lutz et al., 2008;MacLean et al., 2010).

Materials and Methods
The present study is designed to identify the potential relevance of singular mindfulness activities in students' daily routines.Therefore, the immediate impacts of mindfulness activities prior to study sessions are investigated in a situation where students have already been exposed to mindfulness practices before the study (no learning curve is considered).The aim is to identify subtle behavioural changes related to self-regulation and attention distribution when mindfulness activities are included before challenging study sessions.Thus, the phenomenon was addressed through a qualitative approach, with methods that could be replicated by teachers, or other professionals working directly with the children (Eskola & Suoranta, 2008).The observable behaviours related to self-regulation and attention in sessions with and without a mindfulness activity were compared.Students' awareness of their mindset and behaviour, and self-awareness skills were measured using the Freiburg mindfulness inventory (FMI) self-evaluation form and the cognitive and affective mindfulness scale-revised (CAMS-R).

Participants and Data Collection
The participants were chosen purposefully from a pool of Finnish primary schools that have teachers trained in the Mindfulness in School Programme (MiSP) in the region of Pirkanmaa.Invitations were sent to four schools, and one replied positively.Participants were 15 4th-grade students (≈10 years old: 8 female, 7 male) and their class teacher.In the Finnish context, it is not uncommon to have whole classrooms with only 15-20 students, which is the case in this study.The class teacher is experienced in practising mindfulness with her students, and all participants have been previously exposed to MiSP prior to the beginning of the study.
The data was collected in the students' natural classroom environment throughout four weeks of the Autumn term of 2020, in a total of eight encounters with the students.The first encounter was dedicated to presenting the study and allowing students to familiarise themselves with the camera equipment in the classroom, ask questions, and manifest their thoughts about participating in the study.The following six encounters consisted of three of these sessions (1, 3, and 5) excluding mindfulness practices, and three sessions included mindfulness practices guided by the teacher before the execution of the math task (sessions 2, 4, and 6) (see Fig. 1).Each student had approximately 15 min to complete the mathematical problem-solving task.The FMI was applied in all six sessions immediately after the mathematical problem-solving task, measuring students' self-awareness during problem-solving Picture belongs to the dataset, constructed by first and second authors.tasks.The CAMS-R was applied only during the 6th session after the task.The first author explained to children how to understand and complete the questionnaires before their use, and they were able to complete them independently.In the last encounter, researchers gave the students general feedback and showed appreciation for their participation.All six sessions were video recorded.
The study followed ethical principles presented by the Finnish Advisory Board on Research Integrity (TENK, 2019) and EECERA ethical guidelines for research with children (EECERA, 2016).It was authorised by the Ethical Committee of the city of Tampere (protocol authorised on 21.10.2020 in the first author's name).Information about the nature, purposes, and scope of the study were discussed with the principal of the school and the class teacher via a video meeting.Children's parents or legal guardians signed informed consent agreements before data collection.Children themselves had the opportunity to state their awareness and desire to be (or not) part of the study throughout the study.Children were encouraged to ask any questions and express their wish to resign from the study at any point.

Video Recordings
Four cameras were pointed to each table where the students performed the problemsolving task.In addition, one camera was filming the entire classroom.The entirety of the sessions was recorded from the beginning of the task of mindfulness practice to the end of the session when the students were asked to fill out the questionnaire.Using video-recordings increases the reliability and transparency of the study when multiple researchers can analyse the same material and construct the observations frame by frame (Heath et al., 2010).

The Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory (FMI) and the Cognitive and Affective Mindfulness Scale-Revised (CAMS-R)
The FMI (Walach et al., 2006) is a self-report questionnaire with a 14-(short form) or 30-item scale used to measure self-awareness in mindfulness experiences.In this study, the short form of the FMI was used.The CAMS-R (Feldman et al., 2007) is a questionnaire used to measure trait or dispositional mindfulness.It was developed out of the original 18-item version of the CAMS, and it has been validated by both convergent and discriminant validity with concurrent measures of mindfulness, distress, well-being, emotion regulation, and problem-solving approaches (Feldman et al., 2007).Its model covers important domains of mindfulness: attention, self-regulation, present-focus, awareness, and non-judgement, and can easily be used with children (Feldman et al., 2007).The questionnaire provided an overall look at the students' self-awareness at the end of the 6 sessions.
Both instruments were translated from English into Finnish language.The translation was carried out separately by the two first authors and then compared.
Additionally, a reverse translation was carried out by blind reviewers to assure accurate translations.No significant discrepancies were found.

Considerations of the Mathematical Tasks and the Mindfulness Practice
The decision to use mathematics classes as the natural learning context for the data collection was made in dialogue with the teacher.According to the teacher's perceptions, it is during mathematics classes, especially during problem-solving tasks, that students have more difficulties self-regulating, and manifest behaviours that display a lack of engagement (e.g.wandering around the class, playing with other objects, talking to peers, or constantly asking for help, although the aim of the task is independent work).The mathematical tasks used in the study were elaborated based on three different 4th-grade math books, following the current Finnish national core curriculum (2014).The difficulty of each task was calibrated according to each child's previous knowledge before the study with the class teacher's assistance so that the task's difficulty would not be a variable in the analysis of students' behaviours.
The mindfulness activity used prior to the study sessions was adapted from a mindfulness-based intervention curriculum (Kuyken et al., 2013) which consists 45 min of mindfulness practices designed to improve emotional awareness, sustained attention, and attentional and emotional regulation.The adapted version of the sessions addressed learning to direct attention to immediate experience moment by moment and consisted of an introduction relaxation exercise, followed by a group discussion, and a longer practice.All the sessions were the same, avoiding variance from the type of activity.

Analysis
The analysis was carried out in two separate phases.The first phase concentrated on micro-analysing observable behaviours signalling attention and self-regulation.Previous research on self-regulation and attention in classroom activities (Blair & Raver, 2015;Christenson et al., 2012;Volpe et al., 2005) inspired the coding scheme elaborated for this study (see Table 1).The coding scheme consisted of three categories: movements, actions, and eye direction.Within these categories, the sub-categories described different behaviours related to self-regulation and attention.
For this procedure, the video recordings were transformed into a readable and compact AVCHD form and uploaded into ELAN Annotation software, version 6 (Sloetjes, & Wittenburg, 2008).All observable behaviours were coded manually and timed in different tiers, providing information on the amount, frequency, and length of each behaviour (see Fig. 2).When the visibility was poor and the eye direction or behaviour could not be observed, they were not coded, and a blank space was left 1 3 Trends in Psychology (2023) 31:641-664

Table 1
Coding scheme for the observable behaviours

Towards task
The direction of the eye gaze is towards the task on the table

Towards people
The direction of the eye gaze is towards a peer or an adult in the classroom

Wandering eyes
The direction of the eye gaze is not directed on anything specific or is moving in the space.Example: checking the camera, looking at something on the wall, thinking while looking up 1 3 between annotations. 1 The codes were extensively verified following recommendations for qualitative research (Tuomi & Sarajärvi, 2009).Firstly, the two first authors performed a cross-analysis of 20% of the data, adding one sub-category and further code descriptions.Secondly, to increase reliability a blind coder tested the coding scheme.The coder agreement was 72.3% on 20%, calculated by a simple percentage between the two coders.Disagreements were discussed, and a final consensus was reached.Subsequently, all coded behaviours were categorised either as evidencing attention or self-regulation towards the task-engaged or not attentive or selfregulated towards the task-disengaged.For example, signs of constant agitation, such as moving around, a poor ability to maintain focus by constantly changing eye gaze direction, or acting in parallel activities, were interpreted as disengagement (Furrer & Skinner, 2003).The interpretations were then reviewed and quantified in relation to the frequency and timeframe of every type of behaviour for all students in each study session, allowing for a qualitative microanalysis of each behaviour.A comparison of these numbers from an individual and group perspective was drawn between the sessions, including the mindfulness practice and the sessions without it, showing the immediate impacts of mindfulness practices on behaviours depicting attention processes and self-regulation.The logic behind the comparisons in this study is identifying behavioural changes in individual children's behaviours and establishing if the mindfulness activities Picture extracted from the dataset, constructed by first and second authors.The second phase consisted of the analysis of the self-reports on students' self-awareness and mindfulness and the analysis of the outcomes from the mathematics tasks.Individual and group average scores from FMI and CAMS-R were calculated.FMI results were compared between sessions with and without mindfulness practices, and the results from CAMS-R were considered in their totality.The mathematical problem-solving tasks were all reviewed individually concerning the outcome of the task itself and the time students used during the tasks.The performance in the mathematical problem-solving tasks was measured by calculating how much of the task was completed and how much of it was correct using a scale from 1 to 4. For completing the task, the scale scored 4 for the full completion and 1 for nothing being done.For the correctness of the task, having nothing correctly scored 1 point, and having all answers correctly scored 4 points.Finally, the total score was calculated and compared to the self-assessment of the difficulty of the task (easy, well-fitted, hard).High scores indicate high performance.The maximum score was 8 points, and the minimum score was 2 points.The results from all datasets were then crossed to answer the research questions and reach a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon under investigation.

Results from FMI and CAMS-R
Results from group scores of the FMI showed a significant difference between sessions with (M = 34.31;SD = 1.1) and without mindfulness practices (M = 30.3;SD = 1.4) t = 8.26 and normality p-value = 0.014 at p < 0.001.Results from the cognitive and affective mindfulness scale-revised (CAMS-R), as seen in Fig. 3, give an overview of the student's level of self-awareness compared to the total point score of 40 points according to the CAMS-R questionnaire.Students showed, on average, fairly high points, with the highest score being 39 and the lowest being 14 points (Fig. 4).

Eye Gaze Direction
The analysis of the eye direction gave us information on students' attention distribution during task completion.It was possible to identify the focus point (task, other  people, or wandering eyes) using the multiple cameras set in strategic locations of the classroom arrangements, quantify the duration of the eye gaze, and qualitatively and manually determine based on the context if students were engaging or disengaging from the task.The most valuable information in this study was the overall time the students were engaged in the task completion.This result was calculated by adding the total duration of the eye gaze towards the task, towards other people, or a wandering eye gaze that was qualitatively interpreted as engaging or disengaging eye gaze.Observing the engaged eye gaze direction (Fig. 5), all fifteen participants showed increased engagement towards the task when mindfulness practice was performed before the task.Even when considering individual differences in how a child was able to direct their attention to the task, results suggest that the mindfulness practices fostered children's attention towards the resolution of the task and increased students' engagement.For example, child 4 increased the attention towards the resolution of the task from 66.06 (average time in sessions without mindfulness practices) to 80.84% in sessions with mindfulness practices.The highest and lowest differences are found, respectively, in results from child 3, with a 17.25 point increase in average, and child 13, with a total of 2.56 points increase in average after mindfulness practices.
Our analysis also allowed cross-checking for disengaging eye gaze behaviours in study sessions with and without mindfulness practices, and the findings support its positive effects.We identified a decrease in disengaging eye gaze behaviour in all participants when comparing the means of three sessions with and without With Mindfulness Practice Fig. 5 Students' disengagement towards the task based on eye gaze direction.The horizontal axis presents the average percentage of time spent on disengaged eye gaze considering the total time spent on task.The vertical axis presents participant's identification.Excerpts that eye gaze could not be identified are deducted from the total mindfulness practice (see Fig. 6).From this perspective, the most significant result came from child 6, a decrease in disengaged behaviour in 17.17 points in sessions with mindfulness practices.

Children's Movements
Children's movements informed what kind of affects the mindfulness practices had on the students' bodily behaviour.The behaviours categorised as moving around and standing up were all coded as disengaged behaviour, as it signalled a breakup from the task in all situations recorded.Results on the group level analysis showed no significant change in students' behaviour.On an individual level, results show a discrete higher frequency of moving around and standing up in sessions without mindfulness practices for two students (children 3 and 5).Also, results showed that for child 8, the mindfulness practice sessions had the opposite effect; a higher frequency of disengaging behaviours was found in the sessions that included mindfulness practices.Differently, the analysis of unsettled movements offered more visible differences between the problem-solving sessions with and without the mindfulness practices at a group level.Unsettled movements were interpreted both as engaged and disengaged behaviour and identified in 60% of the students (see Fig. 7).Both types of unsettled movements decreased after the mindfulness practice.However, looking closely at the results from children 2, 3, 10, and 14, mindfulness practices supported increasing engaging and decreasing disengaging behaviours, providing a stronger effect.For example, the results for child 14 on the three mathematics sessions Fig. 6 The effects of mindfulness practices on students' engaged and disengaged unsettled movements.The left vertical axis presents the average percentage of time spent on engaged or disengaged unsettled movement of total task time.The right vertical axis presents participants' identification 1 3 Trends in Psychology ( 2023) 31:641-664 without the mindfulness practice indicated 56.48% engaged unsettled movement and 4.49% disengaged unsettled movement of the time spent on task.However, on the three other mathematics sessions with mindfulness practice, the results of child 14 indicated 63.31% engaged unsettled movement and 0.36% disengaged unsettled movement; a decrease of 4.13% of disengaged behaviour, and an increase by 6.83% on engaged behaviour.

Children's Action
Actions were divided into four subcategories, asking for help, talking to a peer or to a teacher, parallel activity, and supportive activity.The results for both engaged and disengaged behaviours of asking for help revealed a decrease in such behaviours with eight participants (children 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 12, 14, 15; see Fig. 8).None of the eight children expressed behaviours of asking for help in the sessions with mindfulness practices.For children 7 and 10, asking for help appeared in sessions with and without mindfulness practice, but there was a decrease in frequency in sessions with mindfulness practice.Three of the children (children 6, 9, and 11) did not express any need for help in any of the sessions.However, results were contradictory for Fig. 7 The effects of mindfulness practices on students' engaged or disengaged asking for help.The vertical axis presents the average percentage of time spent on asking for help of the total time spent on task.
The horizontal axis presents the description of the observable behaviours child 8, who only expressed asking for help after participating in the mindfulness practice.
The actions of talking to a peer or a teacher were coded separately.Actions talking to a teacher appeared in the results of all the students, however, in discrete frequency and length, 1.56% for engaged behaviours and 0.03% for disengaged behaviours.Regarding the behaviour of talking to a peer, it is possible to notice some effects of mindfulness practices on students' behaviours.Talking to a peer appeared more as disengaged behaviour than engaged behaviour (qualitatively assessed based on the analysis of the context).As presented in Fig. 9, all, except one child (child 15), indicated time spent on disengaged conversations with peers in sessions without mindfulness practices.The results on how the mindfulness practices impacted this behaviour revealed that there was a decrease in the disengaged behaviour with 12 participants (children 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14).The most significant variation was with child 10 who was showing only disengaged behaviour in this subcategory, talking to a peer.This disengaged behaviour decreased by 6.02 percentage points with the mindfulness practices.Of the seven participants showing engaged talking to a peer, four showed a decrease in this engaged behaviour to 0 with the mindfulness practices.Although talking to a peer about the activity (engaged behaviour) is not considered a negative process, the aim of the task is independent work.Therefore, in such situations, children would ideally be focused on the task at hand.
Furthermore, the analysis revealed that six out of fifteen students presented parallel activities during the sessions.For these students, the effect of mindfulness practices showed to be inconclusive; disengaging parallel activities decreased in the Fig. 8 The effects of mindfulness practices on students' engaged or disengaged talking to a peer.The vertical axis presents the average percentage of time spent.The horizontal axis describes the observable behaviours of talking to a peer or to the teacher 1 3 Fig. 9 The effects of mindfulness practices on students' parallel activities Fig. 10 The effects of mindfulness practices on students' supportive activities.The horizontal axis presents the average percentage of time on supportive activity considering the total time spent on task.The vertical axis presents participants' identification sessions with mindfulness practices for four out of six students but increased for the other two (see Fig. 10).In relation to the analysis of supportive activity, it was only observed as engaged behaviour towards the task.For eight students (C1, C4, C5, C7, C8, C10, C12, C15), there was an increase in behaviour interpreted as a supportive activity when participating in the mindfulness practices before the mathematical tasks.

Discussion
This study investigated the immediate behavioural effects of mindfulness practices on Finnish elementary school students' attention distribution and self-regulation during mathematical problem-solving sessions.It also investigated students' selfawareness during the execution of such tasks.The results from FMI and CAMS-R, along with the results from the video microanalysis, indicate that practising mindfulness before classes can have an immediate effect on students' attention and self-regulation shown through the decrease of disengaging behaviours (e.g.parallel activities, parallel talks and distractions) and in some cases, the increase of engaging ones (e.g.eye gaze towards the task).The effects on attention distribution were noticed particularly from the analysis of the eye gaze direction, which revealed an increased time spent focusing on the task.All children, regardless of personal differences, spent more time observing and being visually engaged with the task after the mindfulness practices, a behavioural change that precedes any subsequent selfregulatory actions or movements and is directly related to how students engage in learning activities (Christenson et al., 2012).The results are interpreted based on previous studies, where mindfulness practices led to noticing when the mind has wandered and then guiding focus to return to its object of attention by monitoring attention with cognitive flexibility (Jha et al., 2007).This process is explained by the functioning of the anterior insula, which processes sensory and limbic inputs from the body and detects salient events (see Menon & Uddin, 2010).The variance between the 17.27 and the 2.56 percentage points identified between the students portrays the range of individual differences that can be present in a classroom and can also be explained by the evidence that such practices impact individuals differently (Creswell, 2017;Kaufmann et al., 2021).Individual variance is one of the most controversial aspects of mindfulness studies (Farias & Wikholm, 2016).In this study, individual variances also appeared in relation to parallel activities, resulting in inconclusive benefits of mindfulness activities.Although individual variances of this nature are expected and these findings are aligned with those reported in long-term interventions (Black & Fernando, 2014;Parker et al., 2013;Schonert-Reichl & Lawlor, 2010;Zenner et al., 2014), they should be carefully considered in discussions on the benefits of mindfulness practices impacting learning.
In relation to self-regulation, the study presented several behavioural clues that support the claim that mindfulness practices can have a positive effect on students' self-regulation behaviours.Self-regulation is observed when children can modulate their behaviours and control further actions by either refocusing on the relevant aspects of the task, performing supportive actions to prepare for the task, or changing 1 3 Trends in Psychology (2023) 31:641-664 strategies for its completion.Self-regulation is closely connected to an awareness of what is happening to one's own body, and it is very relevant for overall engagement in learning situations (Blair, 2002;McClelland et al., 2010).During the mindfulness practices, the teacher brought to the children's attention different perceptual targets like breathing, thoughts, emotions, and external stimuli: a process that teaches students to be aware of the changes of such states in any given circumstance, including while they performed the task.The results from students' movements, particularly regarding the manifestation of unsettled movements, showed an overall decrease in disengaging behaviours after the mindfulness practice; students expressed less agitation after the practice.These positive effects could indicate improvement in the children, noticing their movements and acting to maintain their attention towards the task when it was needed-regulating their own behaviour.Furthermore, in sessions with mindfulness practices, students manifested a higher frequency of supportive actions, which are actions directly connected to task resolution.Children talked less about other subjects and asked for help fewer times in sessions that included mindfulness practice.Although in this study, the participants did not spend extensive time on these actions, there was still a change in students' behaviours.Such effects are important elements to explain how mindfulness practices influence a variety of aspects of students' self-regulation, which are aligned with previous studies on the positive effects of mindfulness on student's behavioural, emotional, and cognitive self-regulation (Black & Fernando, 2014;Blair & Diamond, 2008;Flook et al., 2015;McClelland et al., 2010;Parker et al., 2013;Viglas, 2018).
By no means is it expected that children become motionless as an effect of mindfulness practice; the results are interpreted within the perspective that such practices can decrease the agitation connected to poor ability to self-regulate during a challenging task (Furrer & Skinner, 2003;Mrazek et al., 2013).For example, in previous studies, mindfulness-based programmes have shown a positive impact on students' hyperactivity, decreasing agitation, and improving concentration (Viglas, 2018).The findings of the present study indicate, from a microlevel perspective, similar behavioural modifications influenced by singular mindfulness practices before the mathematical problem-solving task.Such microbehavioural modifications align with the idea that mindfulness practices can provide a tool for educators to support children in developing self-regulatory behaviours in everyday classroom situations (Parker et al., 2013).

Limitations and Future Directions
Two limitations are highlighted.First, although the study's design provided a variety of points of view and multiple types of data to support its validity, the sample size was small, which limited generalisations and varied types of analyses crossing individual differences.Second, although researchers made sure that students would be acquainted with the cameras in the classroom and is not believed to have impacted children's behaviours, the audience effect was not systematically measured.For future studies, a mixed-methods approach with larger samples, and a design that includes measures of physiological changes (e.g. through smart rings or watches) could give an interesting viewpoint to this phenomenon.

Fig. 1
Fig. 1 Picture of the classroom environment.Picture belongs to the dataset, constructed by the first and second authors moving around in the classroom.Example: walking somewhere Unsettled movement A child is moving around in their place without getting up.Example: tapping a pen, swinging, or rotating on the seat or changing position on the seat Actions Standing up A child stands up from where they are sitting Parallel activity A child is doing an action with an explicit intention unrelated to the task.Example: tying hair in a ponytail, reaching for a water bottle, and having a sip Supportive activity A child is doing an action with an explicit intention related to the task.Example: taking a pencil or an eraser Talking to a peer or the teacher A child is verbally interacting with a peer or the teacher Asking for help A child is gesturing to the teacher.Example: raising a hand or signalling for help waving or touching the teacher Eye direction

Fig. 2
Fig. 2 Example of coded behaviours of the students in ELAN.Picture belongs to the dataset, constructed by the first and second authors

Fig. 3
Fig. 3 Students' total scores of the CAMS-R questionnaire.Vertical axis presents the total score of each student

Fig. 4 3
Fig. 4 Students' engagement towards the task based on the eye gaze direction.The horizontal axis presents the average percentage of time spent on engaged eye gaze direction considering the total time spent on task.The vertical axis present participants' identification.Excerpts that eye gaze could not be identified are deducted from the total