Dr. Richard Davidson

And it's a big urban school district, the Jefferson County Public School District in Louisville.

And we did a randomized controlled trial with 832 educators in Louisville.

And we had them use our Healthy Minds program, which is a digital offering which is freely available as the Healthy Minds program, where we had them cultivate four key pillars of well-being, awareness, connection, insight and purpose.

We can take a deeper dive into each of those after.

But they practiced for around five minutes a day.

the average was a little less than five minutes a day over the course of 28 days.

And we measured standard outcomes like depression and anxiety and stress and measures of flourishing and we find what we found in other studies which is that depression and anxiety and stress went down and measures of well-being and flourishing went up.

But the real kicker is that we by prior agreement had access to the student level data in the school system.

So we were able to look at the performance of the students who were taught by teachers randomly assigned to the well-being training and we compared them to students who were taught by teachers randomly assigned to a control group.

The students had no idea that there was any research going on.

And what we found is that on standardized tests, this is in middle school children, and the sample size for the students was around 13,000.

And what we found is that the standardized math scores of the students who were taught by teachers randomly assigned to the well-being training was significantly greater than the scores of the students who were taught by teachers randomly assigned to the control group.

Yeah, I think everything you said is likely to be going on.

I think the teachers are likely calmer.

They're more connected.

And what we know is that it was interesting because we looked at reading scores and the data for the standardized reading measure was in the same direction, but it wasn't as robust.

The biggest signal was in math scores.

And we know that math performance is degraded by stress.

more than reading performance in this age group.

And so it could be something as simple as the kids who were taught by teachers that went through the well-being training are simply calmer and less stressed when they take the exam.