Effect of a Mindful Breathing Intervention on Community College Students’ Writing Apprehension and Writing Performance

Mindful breathing has been linked to changes in physiology, but we took the practice further by examining whether a mindfulness breathing intervention, a three-minute breathing exercise marked by focused attention on the sensations of breath, affected writing anxiety, and writing performance measures. In addition, we examined mindful breathing as an intervention for community college students—some of the most at risk and underprepared students in higher education in the United States. We compared Daly Miller Writing Apprehension surveys and narrative writing samples from 277 students enrolled in a freshman composition course at a southeastern community college, half of the class sections were randomly assigned to practice a mindful-breathing technique at the beginning of class sessions. Students in the class sections that practiced mindful-breathing group experienced a statistically significant decrease in writing apprehension and mechanical error scores from pre- to post-test when compared to students in the comparison class sections.