2012年2012年February 20, 2011
The Case for Play
How a handful of researchers are trying to save childhood
Yana Paskova for The Chronicle Review
Pretend play—being a chef "cooking" with
Play-Doh, for example—may be essential to children's development, say some
researchers.
By Tom Bartlett
New York
Lucas Sherman and Aniyah McKenzie are building a house in
Central Park. It is small, even by Manhattan standards, and the amenities leave
something to be desired. But Lucas, who is 6, and Aniyah, who is 7, seem
pleased with their handiwork. The house has a skylight (a hole torn in cardboard)
and a flat-screen television (a black square of fabric). Lucas is too busy to
answer a stranger's annoying questions, but Aniyah, who is holding a feather
duster, explains that she must clean the walls because they are very dirty.
Lucas's father, Dan, observes the project from a nearby
bench. "It's amazing what you can do with boxes and junk," he says.
That could almost be the slogan of the New York Coalition
for Play, which provided the boxes and junk. The nonprofit association ran one
of the two dozen booths at the Ultimate Block Party, an event last fall that
brought together companies like Disney, Crayola, and Lego, along with
researchers from Columbia and MIT, and attracted thousands of parents and
children. The goal was to "celebrate the science of play" and to push
back against the notion that education happens only when students are seated at
their desks, staring at chalkboards, and scribbling furiously in their
notebooks.
The rally of sorts was the brainchild of two top play
researchers, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, the authors of
Einstein Never Used Flashcards (Rodale, 2003) and editors, along with
Dorothy Singer, of Play=Learning (Oxford University Press, 2006). They
want to take what they've learned in the lab and proclaim it in the park, or
wherever else people will listen. The message is this: The emphasis on
standardized testing, on attempting to constantly monitor, measure, and
quantify what students learn, has forced teachers to spend more of the school
day engaged in so-called direct instruction and has substantially reduced or
eliminated opportunities that children have for exploring, interacting, and
learning on their own. Recess has, in many districts, vanished from the
schedule entirely. After school, parents shuttle their kids from activity to
activity, depriving them of unstructured time alone or with friends.
That
matters, according to researchers, not just because play reduces stress and
makes children more socially competent—which evidence suggests that it does. It
matters also because play supposedly improves working memory and
self-regulation; in other words, it makes kids sharper and better-behaved. So,
ironically, by shortchanging them on play in favor of academics, we may
actually be inhibiting their development. Hirsh-Pasek, a psychology professor
at Temple University, considers the move away from play to be a crisis, even
comparing it to global warming, in the sense that it may take years for the
consequences to be felt. When it comes to the value of play, she declares:
"The science is clear."
But how clear is it? Even researchers who've devoted much
of their careers to studying play question the more inflated claims of its
importance. Within the world of those who take play seriously, there are
multiple camps, each with its own dearly held tenets. There are the Free
Players, who argue that play is a human right and that adults should more or
less leave kids alone. There are the Play Skeptics, who see play as useful for
blowing off steam but are dubious about its cognitive upside. And there are Play
Moderates, who advocate a mix of free play, adult-guided play, and traditional
classroom instruction. No matter whom you're talking with, though, it seems
every discussion about play eventually comes around to a prolific Russian
psychologist who died more than 75 years ago.
Before tuberculosis claimed him, at just 37, Lev Vygotsky
managed to produce a stack of volumes on topics as diverse as the psychology of
art, the relationship between thought and language, the problem of
consciousness, the behavior of primitive man, scientific language, and child
development. While the amount of work he cranked out is notable in itself,
what's more impressive is how influential that work has become, even though
much of it remained unpublished and untranslated for decades following his
death.
For play researchers, no one looms larger than Vygotsky,
whose name, along with that of his longer-lived and better-known contemporary,
Jean Piaget, pops up on seemingly every other page of the literature. Vygotsky
viewed play, particularly pretend play, as a critical part of childhood,
allowing a child, as he said in one oft-repeated quote, to stand "a head
taller than himself." His biggest theoretical contribution may have been
the Zone of Proximal Development: the idea that children are capable of a range
of achievement during each stage of their lives. In the right environment, and
with the right guidance (which was later dubbed "scaffolding"),
children can perform at the top of that range.
For instance, Vygotsky explained, when a child can
pretend that a broomstick is a horse, he or she is able to separate the object
from the symbol. A broom is not a horse, but it's possible to call a broom a
horse, and even to pretend to ride it. That ability to think abstractly is a
huge mental leap forward, and play can make it happen.
Among the many who have been influenced by Vygotsky is
Deborah J. Leong, the author, along with Elena Bodrova, of Tools of the Mind:
The Vygotskian Approach to Early Childhood Education, an attempt to turn his theories into practical classroom
techniques. Leong, a professor emerita of psychology at Metropolitan State
College of Denver, points out that when young children are pretending, they
often use bigger words than they normally would and fully inhabit their roles,
like mini Method actors. If they're playing doctor, for instance, they might
say "injection" or "thermometer." Recently she watched a
group of preschoolers pretending to work at a well-known chain hardware store.
"Welcome to Home Depot," a 4-year-old said. "You can do it, we
can help." Meanwhile another group of children, who were pretending to be
airport screeners, informed a would-be passenger that a bottle she was carrying
was larger than the permitted three ounces.
Pretend play isn't just about vocabulary. A 2007 study
published in Science looked at how 4-
and 5-year-olds who were enrolled in a school that used the play-based,
Vygotsky-inspired Tools of the Mind curriculum measured up to children in a
more typical preschool. The students in the play-based school scored better on
cognitive flexibility, self-control, and working memory—attributes of
"executive function," which has been consistently linked to academic
achievement. The results were so convincing that the experiment was halted
earlier than planned so that children in the typical preschool could be
switched to the Tools of the Mind curriculum. The authors conclude:
"Although play is often thought frivolous, it may be essential."
With evidence like that, you might think that the kind of
guided pretend play that Vygotsky favored would be universally embraced. In
fact, according to Leong, it's fast disappearing, as the idea of learning
becomes synonymous with memorization and standardized tests. Play is steadily
losing out to what play proponents refer to as the "drill and kill"
method. "We drill more because they can't pay attention, but they can't
pay attention because they don't have these underlying play skills, so we drill
more," Leong says. "It's pathetic."
Not to mention misguided, according to Kathy Hirsh-Pasek.
Whether children play enough isn't an obscure debate among developmental
psychologists. If it's true that children who spend too little time playing
struggle with executive function, then we may be raising a generation of kids with
less self-control, shorter attention spans, and poorer memory skills. If that
really is the case, Hirsh-Pasek's talk about a crisis isn't so far-fetched.
She sees the Ultimate Block Party as the first step in a
national effort to get people to stop dismissing play and start questioning the
way we assume children learn. She wants to speak directly to parents, most of
whom aren't poring over every issue of Child Development for the latest research on play. The goal, in a sound
bite, is to take that research "into the streets, subways, and
supermarkets."
It's not every day that an academic stages a spectacle in
Central Park to bring attention to what is, honestly, a fairly small field of
research. To pull it off, Hirsh-Pasek hired a public-relations agency and
drummed up big-name corporate sponsors. There was a Sesame Street sing-a-long, what was billed as "New York's Largest
Simon Says," and a Radio Disney Dance Party. A small company called
Ridemakerz hawked its build-your-own remote-control cars. Not to mention the
guy selling a nifty iPhone app that lets you play a technologically enhanced
game of hide-and-seek using the smartphone's GPS capability.
There were also decidedly less-profit-driven booths, like
the one run by the New York Coalition for Play. Rather than whiz-bang gadgets,
they offered cardboard boxes and tubes, lots of fabric, ribbon, empty wine
crates, and assorted items that would otherwise be found in a recycling bin.
One of those overseeing the booth was Edward Miller, a senior researcher at the
nonprofit group Alliance for Childhood, part of whose mission is to promote
creative play. When asked what he thought of the Ridemakerz booth just a few
yards away, he couldn't help rolling his eyes. "We're also concerned about
the overcommercialization of play," he said. "The right answer is
less programming and more opportunities for kids to make up things on their
own."
Hirsh-Pasek is well aware that play purists look askance
at including corporations in the pro-play campaign. Those who take a hard line
on free play—that is, giving children basic materials like boxes and fabric and
then leaving them alone—have zero use for Nickelodeon kid bands and pricey
remote-control cars, which they see as just more ways for adults to get in the
way. What she has in mind is a big tent, one that doesn't exclude fancy toys or
snappy musical productions. Nor does she have much patience for advocates who
claim that the only valuable play is the kind that doesn't involve anyone over
18. She wants kids to play on their own, sure, but she also wants them to
engage in more guided play, where an adult or older child can take part.
There's research to back her up. A study she recently
submitted for publication gave blocks to children divided into three groups. In
one group, the blocks had already been assembled into a heliport. A second
group was given blocks, and adults helped the children follow directions to
build a heliport. A third group was given blocks and told to do whatever it
wanted. The researchers then listened to the language children were using as
they played. Those who were building a heliport with an adult used the most
imaginative and spatial language (like "below," "on top,"
"next to"); the kids who were playing with the preassembled heliport
used the least.
While she's no purist, Hirsh-Pasek is suspicious of some
of the toys that purport to be educational. The title of Einstein Never
Used Flashcards (subtitled How Our Children
Really Learn—and Why They Need to Play More and Memorize Less) is an apparent slap at the Disney-owned Baby Einstein
company. She also cites research that shows that electronic books for kids, the
kind that talk and make noises, actually distract young readers: Kids who read
them remember less of the narrative than kids who read the story on
old-fashioned paper. What's more, Hirsh-Pasek says, she turned down millions of
dollars from a corporate sponsor (which she declines to identify) that
requested the right to name the Ultimate Block Party.
In many ways, she is placing herself in the middle. She's
not trying to run toy companies out of business, but she is willing to
criticize products that do more harm than good. She's not attempting to tear
down traditional classroom education, but she is pushing hard for more play in
schools obsessed with testing. To that end, she's working to make the research
on play palatable for teachers and parents.
How good that research is, though, is a matter of debate.
Peter K. Smith began studying play in the mid-1970s. At the time, he was a
believer in the "play ethos," which he defines in his recent book, Children and Play, as the "very strong and unquestioned view of the
importance of play." In that book, he quotes numerous researchers waxing
enthusiastic about play's importance, asserting that it is "vital"
and "the work of childhood" and "the supreme psychological
need."
Later, Smith, a professor of psychology at the University
of London, became a skeptic. "I looked at the textbooks of play" from
Piaget forward, he says. "They said play is essential for development,
that it enhanced this and this, and that and that, but they don't cite any
evidence." So he decided to take a closer look. In the late 1980s, he
picked a couple of studies that claimed to demonstrate the benefits of play. In
one study, researchers had found that playing with small objects helped young
children learn how to solve problems. Another showed that play made kids more
creative. Smith replicated both using a double-blind procedure to eliminate any
potential research bias.
His findings showed no difference in creativity or
problem-solving ability between the kids who played and those who didn't. It
was a setback for play advocates and made researchers wonder whether the field
was based on science or sentimental hype.
More than two decades after Smith's debunking,
researchers like Angeline Lillard, a professor of psychology at the University
of Virginia, are still raising some of the same questions. "I think if you
look hard at all the studies people cite as showing that play helps development,
they are either correlation studies"—in other words, they don't prove that
play actually causes cognitive gains—"or they have problems," she
says.
Not that Lillard, or Smith, for that matter, is antiplay.
Lillard is the author of the best-selling book Montessori: The
Science Behind the Genius and has written
about the possible links between pretend play and social cognition. She does,
however, believe that the field is in need of newer and better research.
"My own view is that I would like for us to have firmer footing to stand
on," she says.
But while scientific support for play can be overstated,
sometimes the criticism of play can be unfounded. Last September, Time magazine published an article with the headline
"Free Play Won't Make Your Child Smarter." The article was prompted
by a study that looked at how 2,751 preschoolers fared in programs with a
variety of approaches, including free play and traditional group instruction.
That study concluded that "more quality instructional time" and
"less free play time" would better prepare kids for school.
But the study's case against play in school isn't
entirely persuasive. It's true that the kids who spent the largest chunk of
their school day (41 percent) engaged in free play were behind their
counterparts on skills like naming letters, naming numbers, and writing their
names. But those who spent 29 percent of their time in teacher-guided play
actually performed at the same level as the kids who played much less (only 13
to 15 percent of the time) when it came to naming numbers, highest number
counted, language and literacy, word and letter identification, and writing
their names legibly. In short, they played twice as much but learned the same
amount. One of the authors of the report, Nina Chien, a postdoctoral researcher
at the University of California at San Diego, acknowledges in an e-mail that
this was proof "that kids can play a lot but still make good gains."
More interesting is what the researchers didn't test. Did
the children who played more demonstrate higher levels of self-control and
better working memory, as other research suggests they would? If so, did they
outperform the kids—preschoolers, remember—who spent 15 percent or less of
their time playing? Is being smart a race to see who can memorize the most, or
is it about developing capacities to deal with a complex world?
While much of the research on play focuses on young
children, the implications go well beyond third grade. In junior high, play is
more likely to be called "discovery learning." When professors try to
get college students to look up from their iPhones, it's probably referred to
as "active engagement." But the principles are the same. Stuart
Brown, one of the authors of Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the
Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul, has
reviewed thousands of life histories and concluded that play is essential for
children and adults. He's intent on spreading that gospel through his
organization, the National Institute for Play, whose mission is to make human
play a "credentialed discipline in the scientific community."
And it's not just people. That nonhuman primates engage
in sophisticated play has been thoroughly established, and anyone who has
dangled a string in front of a cat has conducted animal research. In his book The Genesis of
Animal Play, Gordon Burghardt, a psychology
professor at the University of Tennessee, reports playful behavior in lizards,
turtles, and birds. Even fish have been known to amuse themselves.
For Hirsh-Pasek, the universality of play is part of the
evidence of its value. Why would we do it if it didn't confer an evolutionary
advantage? She concedes that some of the play research is more suggestive than
slam-dunk, and that cleaner, stronger studies would be welcome. But she also
argues that we already know enough to conclude that play matters, and that
failing to preserve it in the lives of children could be a disaster.
She's doing her part to stave that off. Hirsh-Pasek says
40 cities have expressed interest in holding their own Ultimate Block Parties.
She and her colleagues will soon unveil a Web site to promote play research,
and more books are on the way. Their goal, she says, is to restore play to its
rightful, respected place in the lives of children. "Even if we don't
understand it perfectly, it's silly to take play away from society," she
says. "It's like taking love away. It's crazy."
