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Mindfulness emphasizes the awareness of the “here-and-now.” Studies in the recent decade have found that mindfulness can affect positive change in child and adolescent school performance. As an emerging field, however, the mechanisms and effects of mindfulness practice on academic performance for children in developing countries have not been elaborated sufficiently in previous studies. Using China as an example context, this paper examines the relationship between mindfulness practice and academic performance of migrant children, and explores the role of executive function in this relationship. Through a survey with 219 fifth-graders in two migrant schools in Beijing, this study validates the positive association between mindfulness, executive function, and better school grades in Chinese, math, and English tests. Additionally, this study adds empirical evidence to the roles of mindfulness in child development, and also sheds light on the pathway through which mindfulness positively correlates with academic performance. These findings provide implications for addressing child academic challenges and conducting further research among migrant children in China and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the mediating roles of mathematics anxiety and learning interest between problematic smartphone use and mathematics achievement. After two-stage stratified sampling, 30,601 Chinese fourth-graders participated by completing a paper-based test on mathematics achievement and an online questionnaire that included questions on demographic information as well as the problematic smartphone use, mathematics anxiety, and mathematics learning interest scales. The results showed that (1) smartphone use was more problematic among boys than among girls, and students with a low SES tended to be more problematic smartphone users, (2) problematic smartphone use was negatively correlated with mathematics achievement, (3) mathematics anxiety and learning interest partially mediated the relationship between problematic smartphone use and mathematics achievement, and (4) the relationship between problematic smartphone use and mathematics achievement was serially mediated by mathematics anxiety and then mathematics learning interest. The implications of this study and suggestions for future research are discussed. • This study examines the relation between PSU by pupils and math achievement. • The mediating roles of math anxiety and learning interest are also investigated. • PSU was negatively correlated with mathematics achievement. • Math anxiety and learning interest played partially mediating roles respectively. • Math anxiety and then learning interest also played serially mediating roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]