Enhancing academic resilience through mindfulness-based practices in the schools: A study on vocational high school students

In recent years, the positive correlation between mindfulness and resilience has gained visible importance. For this purpose, this study aims to increase the academic resilience and mindfulness level of vocational high school students with a low socioeconomic background, who often have lower resilience toward learning English as a foreign language (EFL) in Tu''rkiye. The study adopted an experimental research design. Before and after an eight-session mindfulness-based intervention, the Academic Resilience Scale and Mindful Attention Awareness Scale-Adolescent measured the levels of mindfulness awareness and academic resilience. The pretest and posttest results in control and experimental groups were analyzed in SPSS, and independent samples t-test and analysis covariance analysis were conducted for data analysis. Focus-group interviews explored possible attributions toward mindfulness awareness and academic resilience, using MAXQDA. The results revealed that there is a significant difference between the groups in terms of academic resilience, but there is no significant difference in the case of mindfulness. On the other hand, most students reported that their academic resilience increased, and they had positive attitudes toward mindfulness-based practices. However, it was observed that their classmates' distractive and biased behaviors in the classroom setting mostly resulted in a lapse in their mindfulness. Mindfulness-based practices could foster academic resilience in socioeconomically disadvantaged vocational high schools. Teachers should be encouraged to adopt mindfulness-based practices throughout the term, rather than beyond immediate interventions, to achieve lasting benefits. Mindfulness-based practices may resist change compared to academic resilience due to short program duration, inexperienced practitioners, teachers' multiple tasks, and students' difficulties in maintaining focus.