̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - David Whitebread

Play matters! New centre will examine role of playfulness in learning

pbh25 — Thu, 22 Oct 2015 08:08:59 +0000

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and the LEGO Foundation will examine the role of playfulness in learning through a new centre and associated professorship.

̽��ֱ��Centre for Research on Play in Education, Development and Learning (PEDAL) has been established with a £4 million grant from the LEGO Foundation which will also fund the leadership role of the LEGO Professorship of Play in Education, Development and Learning.

̽��ֱ��move reflects the well-established links between the ̽��ֱ��, the Foundation and the wider LEGO family. ̽��ֱ��centre will examine the importance of play in education globally with an aim to produce research which supports excellence in education so that children are equipped with 21st Century skills like problem solving, team work and self-control.

PEDAL acting director Dr David Whitebread said: “Play opportunities for children living in modern urban environments are increasingly curtailed, within their homes, communities and schooling. At the same time, play remains a relatively under-researched area within developmental science, with many fundamental questions still unanswered. An invigorated research effort in this area will constitute a significant contribution to understandings about the importance of play and the development, internationally, of high quality education, particularly in the area of early childhood.”

CEO of the LEGO Foundation, Hanne Rasmussen said: “We welcome the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s decision to establish the PEDAL Centre. At the LEGO Foundation, we are committed to promoting the important link between play and learning and to ensuring the value of play is understood and acted upon across society. With PEDAL, understanding the contribution that play makes to child development is recognised as a critical issue.”

̽��ֱ��LEGO Foundation funding allows for the permanent endowment of a professorship and the cost of support and research staff for an initial three year period. During this period, the work of the centre, based at the ̽��ֱ��’s Faculty of Education, will be focused on three strands of research:

- Establishing a long term study of the features of home and school which promote children's playfulness, and the outcomes of early play experience for learning and emotional well-being

- Developing an understanding of the underlying brain processes involved in play, and how to measure playfulness

- Devising and evaluating play-based teaching approaches

Rasmussen adds: “Millions of children are receiving a sub-standard education which means that even though they attend school, they get left behind in the development of skills that are essential in the 21st century. Quality in learning means not just great test scores, but also building the skills that underpin learning throughout a lifetime. Our collaboration with the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge is about investigating play-based quality learning so that we can put a stake in the ground for development of skills in the future of learning.”

̽��ֱ��LEGO Foundation and ̽��ֱ�� have a history of collaboration. A playful writing project called PLaNS is a recent example. ̽��ֱ��research involved looking at how writing in a playful way, using LEGO bricks, can help in the teaching environment.

“ ̽��ֱ��early results of this collaboration are very positive and it is good to see that our work with the Foundation is already starting to yield results. Looking at how play works is increasingly important as international bodies like the United Nations and European Union have now begun to develop policies concerned with children’s right to play. What has been lacking is hard evidence to base their policies on and researching play is inherently tricky. We are looking forward to seeing the result of the research carried out at PEDAL,” said Dr Whitebread.

Three post-doctoral Research Associates are being appointed, each of whom will be assigned to one of the research strands. ̽��ֱ��grant also provides for studentships for two PhD students per year over the first three years.

Cambridge launched a £2 billion fundraising campaign on October 16th, also announcing that more than £530 million has been raised towards that total. ̽��ֱ��campaign for the ̽��ֱ�� and Colleges of Cambridge will focus on the ̽��ֱ��’s impact on the world. Through it, Cambridge is working with philanthropists to address major global problems. ̽��ֱ��generous grant from the Lego Foundation is the latest example of this, joining gifts to support Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s research, and to support engineering innovation and design.

Other examples of LEGO and ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge interactions include the use of LEGO bricks by the Department of Engineering which allows for a large degree of play, experimentation and freedom in its teaching and research programmes. In 2012 the ̽��ֱ��’s Fitzwilliam Museum, with the aid of an engineering student, used LEGO bricks to help save a delicate Egyptian mummy case.

Carousel image from homepage: Kids at play by Emilien Etienne.

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and the LEGO Foundation launch new research centre and professorship.

With PEDAL, understanding the contribution that play makes to child development is recognised as a critical issue.

Hanne Rasmussen, CEO of the LEGO Foundation

More information:

About PEDAL: ̽��ֱ��guiding focus of the centre’s work is to develop substantial and compelling research concerned with the role of play and playfulness in young children’s learning and development, and the potential of play-based approaches within educational contexts. ̽��ֱ��kinds of skills and accomplishments that are widely recognised as being vital components of 21st century educational provision, including critical thinking, problem-solving, interpersonal abilities, emotional resilience and creativity, have all been linked theoretically and empirically to playfulness and playful learning.
About the LEGO Foundation: ̽��ֱ��LEGO Foundation shares the mission of the LEGO Group: to inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow. ̽��ֱ��Foundation is dedicated to building a future where learning through play empowers children to become creative, engaged, lifelong learners. Its work is about re-defining play and re-imagining learning. In collaboration with thought leaders, influencers, educators and parents the LEGO Foundation aims to equip, inspire and activate champions for play: www.LEGOfoundation.com.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Play’s the thing

lw355 — Tue, 04 Aug 2015 08:56:32 +0000

Brick by brick, six-year-old Alice is building a magical kingdom. Imagining fairy-tale turrets and fire-breathing dragons, wicked sorcerers and gallant heroes, she’s creating an enchanting world. Although she isn’t aware of it, this fantasy will have important repercussions in her adult life: it is helping her take her first steps towards her capacity for abstract thought and creativity.

Minutes later, Alice has abandoned the kingdom in favour of wrestling with her brother – or, according to educational psychologists, developing her capacity for strong emotional attachments. When she bosses him around as ‘his teacher’, she’s practising how to regulate her emotions through pretence. When they settle down with a board game, she’s learning about rules and turn-taking.

“Play in all its rich variety is one of the highest achievements of the human species,” says Dr David Whitebread from Cambridge’s Faculty of Education. “It underpins how we develop as intellectual, problem-solving, emotional adults and is crucial to our success as a highly adaptable species.”

Recognising the importance of play is not new: over two millennia ago, Plato extolled its virtues as a means of developing skills for adult life, and ideas about play-based learning have been developing since the 19th century.

But we live in changing times, and Whitebread is mindful of a worldwide decline in play. “Over half the world’s population live in cities. Play is curtailed by perceptions of risk to do with traffic, crime, abduction and germs, and by the emphasis on ‘earlier is better’ in academic learning and competitive testing in schools.

“ ̽��ֱ��opportunities for free play, which I experienced almost every day of my childhood, are becoming increasingly scarce. Today, play is often a scheduled and supervised activity.”

International bodies like the United Nations and the European Union have begun to develop policies concerned with children’s right to play, and to consider implications for leisure facilities and educational programmes. But what they often lack is the evidence to base policies on, as Whitebread explains: “Those of us who are involved in early childhood education know that children learn best through play and that this has long-lasting consequences for achievement and well being. But the kind of hard quantifiable evidence that is understood by policy makers is difficult to obtain. Researching play is inherently tricky.”

“ ̽��ֱ��type of play we are interested in is child-initiated, spontaneous and unpredictable – but, as soon as you ask a five-year-old ‘to play’, then you as the researcher have intervened,” explains Dr Sara Baker. “And we want to know what the impact of play is years, even decades, later. It’s a real challenge.”

Dr Jenny Gibson agrees: “Although some of the steps in the puzzle of how and why play is important have been looked at, there is very little, high-quality evidence that takes you from the amount and type of play a child experiences through to its impact on the rest of its life.”

Now, thanks to the new Centre for Research on Play in Education, Development and Learning (PEDaL), Whitebread, Baker, Gibson and a team of researchers hope to provide evidence on the role played by play in how a child develops.

“A strong possibility is that play supports the early development of children’s self-control,” explains Baker.

“These are our abilities to develop awareness of our own thinking processes – it influences how effectively we go about undertaking challenging activities.”

In a study carried out by Baker with toddlers and young pre-schoolers, she found that children with greater self-control solved problems quicker when exploring an unfamiliar set-up requiring scientific reasoning, regardless of their IQ. “This sort of evidence makes us think that giving children the chance to play will make them more successful and creative problem-solvers in the long run.”

If playful experiences do facilitate this aspect of development, say the researchers, it could be extremely significant for educational practices because the ability to self-regulate has been shown to be a key predictor of academic performance.

Gibson adds: “Playful behaviour is also an important indicator of healthy social and emotional development. In my previous research, I investigated how observing children at play can give us important clues about their well being and can even be useful in the diagnosis of neurodevelopmental disorders like autism.”

Whitebread’s recent research has involved developing a playful approach to supporting children’s writing. “Many primary school children find writing difficult, but we showed in a previous study that a playful stimulus was far more effective than an instructional one.” Children wrote longer and better structured stories when they first played with dolls representing characters in the story. In the latest study, children first built their story with LEGO, with similar results. “Many teachers commented that they had always previously had children saying they didn’t know what to write about. With the LEGO building, however, not a single child said this through the whole year of the project.”

̽��ֱ��strand of research he leads in the Centre will focus on the results of large-scale longitudinal studies, such as the ̽��ֱ�� of London’s Millennium Cohort Study, which is charting the social, economic and health conditions of individual children. Whitebread hopes to determine how much a child plays, the quality of their playfulness, and with what end result.

Even when this evidence is known, it is often difficult to develop practices that best support children’s play. ̽��ֱ��two research strands led by Gibson and Baker will aid this: Gibson will be developing an understanding of the cognitive processes involved in play and measures of playfulness, and Baker will be constructing and evaluating play-based educational interventions.

Whitebread, who directs PEDaL, trained as a primary school teacher in the early 1970s, when, as he describes, “the teaching of young children was largely a quiet backwater, untroubled by any serious intellectual debate or controversy.” Now, the landscape is very different, with hotly debated topics such as school starting age and the introduction of baseline assessment to those starting school in September 2015.

“Somehow the importance of play has been lost in recent decades. It’s regarded as something trivial, or even as something negative that contrasts with ‘work’. Let’s not lose sight of its benefits, and the fundamental contributions it makes to human achievements in the arts, sciences and technology. Let’s make sure children have a rich diet of play experiences.”

Children’s play is under threat from increased urbanisation, perceptions of risk and educational pressures. ̽��ֱ��first research centre of its kind aims to understand the role played by play in how a child develops.

Play in all its rich variety is one of the highest achievements of the human species

David Whitebread

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

School starting age: the evidence

tdk25 — Tue, 24 Sep 2013 09:18:53 +0000

In England children now start formal schooling, and the formal teaching of literacy and numeracy at the age of four. A recent letter signed by around 130 early childhood education experts, including myself, published in the Daily Telegraph (11 Sept 2013) advocated an extension of informal, play-based pre-school provision and a delay to the start of formal ‘schooling’ in England from the current effective start until the age of seven (in line with a number of other European countries who currently have higher levels of academic achievement and child well-being).

This is a brief review of the relevant research evidence which overwhelmingly supports a later start to formal education. This evidence relates to the contribution of playful experiences to children’s development as learners, and the consequences of starting formal learning at the age of four to five years of age

There are several strands of evidence which all point towards the importance of play in young children’s development, and the value of an extended period of playful learning before the start of formal schooling. These arise from anthropological, psychological, neuroscientific and educational studies. Anthropological studies of children’s play in extant hunter-gatherer societies, and evolutionary psychology studies of play in the young of other mammalian species, have identified play as an adaptation which evolved in early human social groups. It enabled humans to become powerful learners and problem-solvers. Neuroscientific studies have shown that playful activity leads to synaptic growth, particularly in the frontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for all the uniquely human higher mental functions.

In my own area of experimental and developmental psychology, studies have also consistently demonstrated the superior learning and motivation arising from playful, as opposed to instructional, approaches to learning in children. Pretence play supports children’s early development of symbolic representational skills, including those of literacy, more powerfully than direct instruction. Physical, constructional and social play supports children in developing their skills of intellectual and emotional ‘self-regulation’, skills which have been shown to be crucial in early learning and development. Perhaps most worrying, a number of studies have documented the loss of play opportunities for children over the second half of the 20th century and demonstrated a clear link with increased indicators of stress and mental health problems.

Within educational research, a number of longitudinal studies have demonstrated superior academic, motivational and well-being outcomes for children who had attended child-initiated, play-based pre-school programmes. One particular study of 3,000 children across England, funded by the Department for Education themselves, showed that an extended period of high quality, play-based pre-school education was of particular advantage to children from disadvantaged households.

Studies have compared groups of children in New Zealand who started formal literacy lessons at ages 5 and 7. Their results show that the early introduction of formal learning approaches to literacy does not improve children’s reading development, and may be damaging. By the age of 11 there was no difference in reading ability level between the two groups, but the children who started at 5 developed less positive attitudes to reading, and showed poorer text comprehension than those children who had started later. In a separate study of reading achievement in 15 year olds across 55 countries, researchers showed that there was no significant association between reading achievement and school entry age.

This body of evidence raises important and serious questions concerning the direction of travel of early childhood education policy currently in England. In the interests of children’s academic achievements and their emotional well-being, the UK government should take this evidence seriously.

Earlier this month the "Too Much, Too Soon" campaign made headlines with a letter calling for a change to the start age for formal learning in schools. Here, one of the signatories, Cambridge researcher David Whitebread, from the Faculty of Education, explains why children may need more time to develop before their formal education begins in earnest.

In the interests of children’s academic achievements and their emotional well-being, the UK government should take this evidence seriously

David Whitebread

Nick Page from Flickr.

"Back to School". Homepage banner image by Woodley Wonderworks via Flickr

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