Article Review Assignment On Mindfulness

Le Wang 20508196 PSYCH 291 Article Review Assignment Mindfulness was a great way to enhance an individual 's life. In the popular press article named Mindfulness Could Improve College Students ' Testing Ability, Study Finds (“Mindfulness Could Improve College Students ' Testing Ability, Study Finds,” 2013), causal claims were reported and supported by an experimental study, including the major claim that mindfulness practice could raise performances in working memory and GRE reading examination. A minor causal claim mentioned in the article was the reduction of interrupted thoughts after the mindfulness practice. So there were four variables of interest here, including a manipulated variable which was the method of training …show more content…
The news article did not capture some key details of this experimental study which can possibly lower the validity of the study. For instance, it did not report exactly how the participants were distributed into each condition. In other words, the article did not mention that participants were assigned to meditation sessions or nourishment sessions randomly. More importantly, all other procedures were identical for participants in both classes except this random assignment to conditions. Next, the research design was subtle because it controlled for confounding variables carefully, such as using deception to disguise the true purpose of the study in order to reduce motivation and placebo effects, eliminating self-selection effects through random assignment, providing similar teaching facilities and classroom designs, using computers to administer tests to lower experimenter expectancy effects, controlling for practice effects through the usage of comparable questions in both pretest and posttest. Additionally, the article did not mention any of these details which again lowered the validity of this study. Lastly, the last paragraph in the article was confusing for readers because …show more content…
There were some mandatory details on construct validity of this study which were unreported in the article, particularly the reliability of GRE reading, working memory, and mind-wandering thoughts measures. In addition, the time of both pretest and posttest was reported incorrectly in the article. The test time should be less than a week before and after both classes rather than a week in the article. Similarly, there were errors in the external validity in the article. For example, the title used testing ability to generalize the GRE reading and working memory increments which was incorrect because they were not appropriate operationalizations of the conceptual definition of testing ability. Nevertheless, the article adequately described the participants as undergraduates and stated the partial findings properly. Thus, the article reported the construct validity and external validity of the study with partial