Flickr:Woodleywonderworks

By Eleanor Yang Su

It’s one of the biggest debates going on among early childhood development experts: Is it more important for kindergartners to focus on academics and learn their ABC’s and numbers? Or spend more time on social and emotional issues, like how to play nice and pay attention?

Recent research by a UC Irvine education professor shows that math skills among kindergartners turn out to be a key predictor for future academic success.

Professor Greg Duncan and his colleagues analyzed studies conducted with close to 20,000 kindergartners, assessing their knowledge of math, literacy and other skills, including their ability to stay on task and make friends. The studies followed the kindergartners for several years through elementary school, testing them in reading and math.

Even after accounting for differences in IQ and family income, Duncan found that those who learned the most math in kindergarten tended to have the highest math and reading scores years later.

“It was very surprising,” said Duncan, whose research appears in a new book. “Everyone says reading is most important, and if a child can read by third grade, the chance of dropping out of school is so much lower. But it was math that stood out as serving the kids best in promoting later achievement. Reading was next most important, and then attention skills were third most important.”

Social skills, including the ability to self-regulate and control one’s temper, are also important. But Duncan found that they weren’t as closely linked to future academic success as math and reading. Students who exhibit antisocial behavior through elementary and middle school tend to drop out of high school at higher rates, Duncan found, but again, those with persistently low math scores also dropped out at higher rates.

He said his research shows that kindergarten teachers ought to devote more time to math instruction. It can be simple things, he said, like learning shapes and numbers and the concept of smaller and bigger numbers along a number line.

“If you show kindergartners a line with zero at one end and 10 at the other, and ask them, ‘Where’s the 8?’, they tend to put the 8 in the middle,” Duncan said. “They don’t know that there’s this cardinal pattern. And unless you show them a number line and they understand where numbers are in relation to each other, it’ll be hard for them to get addition and subtraction later on.”

But some question whether children are ready for certain math concepts in kindergarten. As kindergarten has grown more academically oriented in the past decade, there’s been an increasing emphasis on teaching more advanced material to younger children.

“Kindergartners are learning what used to be learned in the first grade,” said Jill Cannon, a researcher who has written about kindergarten for the Public Policy Institute of California. “Some people even argue that preschool is becoming too academic.”

Some childhood advocates warn that instructional time is edging out playtime and putting unnecessary pressure and stress on kids. In its report [PDF] “Crisis in the Kindergarten,” the nonprofit Alliance for Childhood argues that children were being taught to master material beyond their developmental level while being deprived of playtime to help them cope with the stress.

“Some kindergartners are being taught to count to 100 by 1’s and by 10’s,” said Edward Miller, a senior researcher for the Alliance for Childhood. “But it’s very clear from the research that 5-year-olds are not capable of really understanding that kind of large number. So they’re being taught to repeat something that’s meaningless. And if they don’t, they get labeled as failures.”

Duncan said kindergartners are ready for a variety of math concepts that can be taught in fun and playful ways.

“I’m not implying that there needs to be flashcards and drill-and-kill exercises,” Duncan said. He suggests teachers use math lessons that let kids explore and manipulate numbers. For parents, he recommends they point out shapes to their kids and play cards and board games to help them get comfortable with counting.

The story was originally posted on California Watch, the state’s largest investigative reporting team and part of the Center for Investigative Reporting. Learn more at www.californiawatch.org

Flickr: Ernst Vikne

By Aran Levasseur

The goal of the videogame “Civilization” is to build a civilization that stands the test of time. You start the game in 4000 B.C. as a settler and, with successful gameplay, can create a civilization that lasts until the Space Age. Throughout the game, you need to manage your civilization’s military, science, technology, commerce and culture.

One doesn’t read “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” to develop strategy before playing the game. One starts by playing. This is true for all videogames. You start by exploring the world with curiosity and begin to develop a hypothesis of what you’re supposed to do. Through trial, error, pattern recognition, logic and chance you continually reformulate your trajectory.

This model of learning is not only effective for videogames but for all digital tools, and I would argue that play — especially in the digital sense — is emerging as a pedagogical keystone for education in the 21st century.

Stuart Brown, M.D., explains in his book, Play, how a range of scientific disciplines have revealed the importance of lifelong play. Playfulness amplifies our capacity to innovate and to adapt to changing circumstances. Adults who are deprived of play are often rigid, inflexible and closed to trying out new options. Play is an active process that reshapes our rigid views of the world.

THE POWER OF PLAY

Play is also a powerful vehicle for learning, something that’s been underscored for me in my work at San Francisco University High School where we began a one-to-one iPad program in the fall.

The iPad has been hyped as a device that will revolutionize education. And, while I’ve witnessed glimmers of this potential, it isn’t microwavable. Migrating from an analog to a digital environment sounds simple enough, but the reality has been more disruptive.

Disruption can signal the onset of innovation, but this isn’t comforting to the organizations and individuals that are at the epicenter of such turbulence. Yet with a schema of play, we can start to mitigate the resistance to change.

CREATING A SANDBOX

The virtues of Apple’s intuitive interfaces have been widely extolled, and while you don’t need to be computer-savvy to navigate the operating system, there still is a learning curve. As we’ve designed training programs to make the learning curve as frictionless as possible, I’ve noticed that sessions that put a premium on play were not only more effective at cultivating the targeted skills, but also encouraged a growth mindset.

The atmosphere of play created a sandbox where both students and faculty could explore the features of the device and apps with the spirit of curiosity and experimentation. Rather than solely being guided through this virtual landscape, they were learning how to orient and guide themselves. Within this learning model, the teacher or trainer shifts into more of a coaching role. The value of this approach extends beyond the classroom because students begin to develop a self-reliance that enjoys independent experimentation and exploration.

Play is vital for normal cognitive, social and emotional development. It reduces stress and increases well-being. Absence of play leads to maladaptive behavior.

As positive as play is, it requires the ability to make mistakes. It implies being able to entertain multiple scenarios and outcomes. Bubble logic, i.e., our testing culture, is diametrically opposed. Our systems of education haven’t prepared us to think and act playfully, nor do our institutions of work by and large encourage this behavior. Yet it is this kind of playful disposition that is the muse of all great thinkers, artists and innovators.

Joichi Ito, the director of the MIT Media Lab, in a recent New York Times essay emphasized the correlation between innovation and play. In Ito’s view, retaining childlike qualities such as idealism, experimentation and wonder is vital for innovation. In his words, “I don’t think education is about centralized instruction anymore; rather, it is the process establishing oneself as a node in a broad network of distributed creativity.”

Play is about exploring the possible. In times of rapid change, exploring the possible becomes an essential skill. We don’t have maps for the territory of tomorrow. As a result, all citizens must become explorers of this emerging world. The best way to prepare for the emergence of the future is to learn how to be comfortable with uncertainty. To be comfortable with uncertainty, one must remain fluid, receptive and creative — in a word: playful.

Aran Levasseur has taught taught middle school history and science, integrating technology to enhance his teaching and student learning. Currently he’s the Academic Technology Coordinator at San Francisco University High School.

The article was originally published by PBS MediaShift, covering the intersection of media and technology. Follow @PBSMediaShift for Twitter updates, or join us on Facebook.

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Last spring, there was a minor outcry when the Auburn School District in Maine announced that it would be piloting a one-to-one iPad program with its kindergarteners. Part of the uproar involved the cost of the program — some $200,000. But much of it involved the notion that somehow young children should not be exposed to technology, that somehow iPads and other gadgets inhibit their imagination and make them play less — or, to slightly modify one of Apple’s famous logos, to “play different.”

But is that really the case? Has technology really dampened the way children play?

A new study (PDF) of children’s playground games and songs suggests that much of the outcry about declining kids’ play may be exaggerated. The research comes from a collaboration between the Universities of London, Sheffield and East London, along with the British Library, and draws from the Opie Collection and the work of the famous children’s folklorists Lona and Peter Opie.

And as most folklorists will tell you, the discipline itself has always been associated with the idea that cultural practices — whether of children or adults — are dying out, and that songs and games and folktales must be collected and preserved to prevent that from happening. So it was in the 19th century, and so it is today.

Things have changed since the Opies did their research on children’s folklore in World War II. It isn’t simply the rise of technology or media influences; family structure is more fluid (with more divorces, for example) and the definitions of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood have changed too. Children, particularly those from higher socio-economic backgrounds, have more leisure time, but there’s also more surveillance over their activities — no matter their background. No more playing freely in the street, for example. The playground space — where many folklorists observe children’s games and songs — has changed as well.

But despite the fears about an untoward influence of media and technology, the researchers found that children’s folklore and children’s imaginations still thrive:

“Modern children are, then, immersed in an enveloping mediascape, which is impossible for them to ignore. However, our research indicates that playground culture and children’s games are not overwhelmed, marginalised or threatened by the quantity and plurality of available media. We have seen that children make use of the cultural and media resources that surround them, and creatively manipulate them to their own ends. In the playground, children are still singing rhymes and songs that have come down through the decades, whilst sometimes bringing them up to date with references to the latest TV shows, soap opera characters and pop stars. Skipping games and clapping games are still popular, and hula‐hoops have made a come‐back. Cheerleading and other dance routines are in evidence, children citing influences as diverse as Michael Jackson and High School Musical. Make‐believe games and old favorites such as Tig are staples of the primary school playground. Media is an undeniably important aspect of children’s lives, but part of a wider repertoire of playground culture that also includes older games, songs and rhymes.”

Children still play hand-clapping games; they still play singing games; they still play “counting out” games; they still know the rules for “tag” and the like. And according to the researchers, there is “evidence of a rich expansion of pretend play drawing on a wider media landscape.”

Children’s play is changing, as it always has and will continue to. But there seems very little evidence that the influence of technology and media is making them play less.

(via Sylvia Martinez)

Flickr:Gitsul

Back when Jill Vialet was a kid, she used to play with her neighborhood friends for hours at a time, unsupervised. It seemed unstructured, because no adults had established any parameters. But in fact, all their games had rules.

“We knew how to pick teams, resolve conflicts, there were spoken and unspoken rules,” she says. “There was a real culture of play. There was a real structure but kids owned it.”

In the past generation, emphasis on play has shifted dramatically. For one thing, kids are rarely left unsupervised for a number of different reasons. Add to that the trend of cutting recess from school hours (only 26 minutes per day as of 2006), and the opportunity to learn how to play for kids has been really cut back.

Vialet is the founder of Playworks, a nonprofit organization that coaches schools, teachers, and playground supervisors on how to encourage good play practice. In some schools, Vialet says, recess is considered a nuisance — a time for kids to get into fights that go unresolved, resulting in tensions that are brought back into the classroom and spill over into instructional times.

“If you talk with some principals, they see recess as a time of day that has a negative impact on school climate,” she says. “There are more suspensions and discipline problems as a result.”

“Recess is meaner than it used to be,” one Oakland principal told New York Times writer David Bornstein.

Playworks steps in to help schools create a structure for play, and to familiarize both adults and kids with the tools of play. “It seems naïve to think that kids are going to figure out how to do it all on their own on the playground,” Vialet says. “We all had to learn from someone.”

Schools deploy Playworks in two ways: they can hire fulltime staff person, experts in play, from Monday through Friday for the school year, or they can hire Playworks to train teachers, yard monitors, and security guards.

“They take a generative approach,” Vialet says of the Playworks staff. “This is where we’re going to play kickball, these are the rules to this game. And they help create ideas that the kids will inevitably own instead of telling them what to do.”

And that’s the point — to create a scaffolding for play, and to encourage kids to come up with their own rules.

Vialet says in schools where the program has been institute, school staff say they love their jobs more, suspension rates have plummeted, there’s less violence, more peer social behavior, and more intermingling of different kinds groups.

According to a study published in Pediatrics, “school children who receive more recess behave better and are likely to learn more.”

Playworks is growing quickly. With an $18.7 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the nonprofit will expand to 350 schools next year, and will serve more than 100,000 students. The organization is building a training business, as well.

Vialet was interviewed on KQED’s Forum program recently. You can listen to the program here.