Our Impact
From the start, I have been personally invested in creating an impact on the short and long-term mental and emotional health of our world. Creating Kind Mind is my way of doing that, by sharing powerful practices and teachings that have transformed how I face trauma with resilience, how I connect with myself and others, how I feel, and how I navigate living in the world with love and kindness. With this as my foundational vision, I have been dedicated to research and evaluation to ensure our program is evidence-based and continuously improving to meet the needs of our teachers, children, and families. As we enter Stage 3 of the long-awaited CASEL accreditation process, this week I want to share our program’s impact.
Our Impact
I want to lay out our research and findings in simple terms. But please know, we partnered with our local University to establish rigorous research design and analysis, meeting the highest standards of a study. If you are interested in looking at the full research paper, please use the CONTACT US page on our website and we are happy to share.
We used a validated assessment tool called the Strengths and Difficulties questionnaire to measure social-emotional learning outcomes for our students. This tool looks at the following outcomes:
- Emotional Distress and Anxiety
- Conduct and Behavioral Problems
- ADHD Symptoms and Difficulty Focusing
- Peer Relationships and Challenges
- A Sense of Belonging and Peer Engagement
We asked our teachers to assess each child before they started using Kind Mind, and again 4-5 months after using the program. We also had a group of teachers and students who were not using Kind Mind at all to assess a group of children at the same time points, so we could have a comparison group and ensure our results were a true reflection of the program, and not other influences. We worked with classroom teachers and school counselors to understand the impact of the program on the various methods of implementation that we offer to schools. Teachers used the curriculum and practice daily for 5-20 minutes, while counselors worked with students once a week for 30 minutes.
Our findings concluded that Kind Mind has a positive impact on each of the social-emotional learning outcomes that we measured, whereas the comparison group (the students who did not receive Kind Mind), showed worsening in each outcome, aside from one that showed slight improvement. If you are interested in reviewing our graphs to show the improvements each outcome in both the Kind Mind and comparison groups, visit our IMPACT page.
Overall, our research shows that Kind Mind:
- Lowers emotional distress and anxiety in children
- Reduces conduct problems in the classroom (disruptive and aggressive behavior)
- Improves children’s ability to regulate their bodies, emotions, and focus
- Improves prosocial, kind, and helpful behavior
- Improves children’s sense of belonging and peer engagement
Furthermore, we determined that these improvements are significant or highly significant, meaning that by comparing to a group of children who did not participate in the program we have eliminated the chance that our findings are by chance or a fluke. Our analysis determines that these results are directly related to our program and the impact it has on children.
I am humbled and eager to share this with more teachers and children now that I can stand behind research proving Kind Mind’s impact and success. And as we grow, our teachers continue to provide critical feedback and ideas so we can continuously improve our program, practices, and approach.
