How guided play promotes early learning | Encyclopedia of early childhood development (2023)

Introduction

Parents, teachers, educators and policy makers are committed to children's learning. Members of all these groups struggle with the important question of what is the best pedagogical approach to support learning, both generally and in specific domains such as mathematics, reading and critical thinking. While direct instruction can be effective for early childhood learning, recent research suggests that discovery-based methods can be even more effective. Given the widespread consensus in the educational and research literature that play is one of the most natural pathways to early childhood discovery and learning,¹a game-based pedagogy can be a particularly powerful mechanism for learning. While it is not yet known exactly how playful experiences can support the learning of new content or skills, recent research suggests that guided play (a form of play directed by children with adult support) may be an approach that harnesses pleasure. experienced during free play while providing opportunities to learn content and skills.

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Play improves young children's health and well-being and also provides opportunities to explore social roles and develop cooperative and self-regulatory skills.^2,3Ongoing research is exploring the role of play in more traditional forms of learning (eg math, reading, critical thinking), and it is becoming increasingly clear that guided play can be an effective teaching strategy.

Problems

While there is widespread agreement that play is good for children's development in general, the research base is less certain about the role of play in children's learning specifically. As noted in a recent review,⁴Many have concluded that play offers great benefits for learning, but current science has yet to catch up with this claim, especially when it comes to improving specific skills such as problem solving and teaching knowledge.

search context

It is undeniable that children enjoy the game and derive some benefits from it. But when children are expected to achieve a particular learning goal, research suggests that it may also be necessary to provide them with a more structured instructional environment to enable them to learn. Resolving the paradox between children's natural abilities to learn through play and the need to learn essential content and skills involves realizing that there are different types of play, each of which can serve different purposes.

Main research questions

What types of learning experiences (eg, free play, guided play, direct instruction) best support young children's content and skill learning? Also, how can we use what researchers find in studies to improve children's academic and personal outcomes in classrooms and at home?

Recent search results

When educators and parents talk about children's play, they often mean free play: unstructured time when children are free to choose their actions with a variety of objects or activities. This type of play can confer some benefits, such as improving children's attention by allowing them to release excess energy. However, because it is unstructured, free play may not be especially beneficial for children learning certain types of content knowledge.⁵In one study, for example, children were asked to learn about properties of shape criteria (eg, triangles always have three sides and three angles). Children were able to learn this information when it was taught to them directly, using picture cards and flexible sticks for visual support, but not when they were simply given the cards and sticks to play with.⁶Therefore, free play may not be ideal when a particular curriculum goal is in mind.

Fortunately, there is another type of game that benefits children's content learning: guided play. This is a form of play in which the children's activities are guided by an informed adult, allowing the children's actions to lead them towards the learning goal.^7-9Adults can provide this scaffolding by structuring the environment in advance (e.g., providing certain types of toys, as in Montessori education) or by responding sensitively to children's actions in a play session and offering open suggestions (e.g., encouraging children exploring materials). haven't explored yet: "What do you think would happen if you...?").

One of the most important features of guided play is that children's actions within the play session must be freely chosen. This is the hallmark of the game - that the children themselves are in charge and can choose what to do at any time. Both free play and guided play share this feature. However, guided play also includes an important role for adults. In guided play, adults must allow children to maintain locus of control, but they must also provide subtle guidance that allows them to explore the correct aspects of the environment to achieve the learning objective.

Studies show that guided play is really effective in enabling children to learn. Specifically, research has found that children who participate in guided play activities are more likely to learn certain information than children who participate in free play and, in some cases, more likely than children who receive direct instruction. For example, an intervention to teach new vocabulary words through book reading activities found little learning when children played freely with toys related to the new words. However, giving children adult guidance in their play significantly increased the number of new words children learned.¹⁰Likewise, several studies have shown that children can learn about new causal structures when they freely explore in highly constrained environments.^11,12In support of these studies, a meta-analysis found that learning in guided game environments was comparable, if not better, to learning through direct instruction, which was superior to learning through commercially available unstructured environments.⁵

research gaps

Just as not all games are created equal, it is likely that not all types of playful learning are created equal when it comes to supporting different outcomes. For example, free play can be especially beneficial for early childhood collaboration and communication development, but guided play can become increasingly important for learning content knowledge throughout elementary school. There is still much work to be done to determine which pedagogical approaches are best for different outcomes and at what ages and stages they are most beneficial. Future work should also focus on exactly which types of guidance are most useful for different learning objectives and for children from different backgrounds, as some objective learning outcomes may benefit from more or less adult presence in the play situation.

conclusions

Many educators and researchers have opposing perspectives on play, believing that all play leads to learning or that play and learning are entirely separate processes. In an attempt to fill this gap, recent research has begun to examine the ways in which different types of games can support different types of learning objectives. In particular, research has shown that guided play, a form of adult-supported play experience, can be particularly beneficial for children's learning. We believe that the secret to the success of guided play lies in the combination of adult support and child independence. Having an adult organize the situation and provide hints along the way ensures that children's exploration is properly restricted. But allowing autonomy to be with children keeps the situation fun and interesting for them, exploits their natural propensity to learn and explore, and allows their own interests to guide their actions, which leads to more learning.

Implications for parents, services, and policies

All parents, educators and policy makers want to ensure that the children of today are the successful adults of tomorrow. This desire often creates tensions between children's desire to play and adults' desire to impart specific content knowledge (eg, math or reading) or skills (eg, communication, creativity, or collaboration). Time in childhood is limited and expectations are high. This combination can lead to decisions that promote direct instruction (eg, flash cards, repetitive lessons) about exploration and discovery. Research suggests that this stress can be misplaced. Guided play, in which adults help structure a play activity but allow children to take the lead and lead the session, is not only more fun for the child, but can also be particularly effective for learning. While research continues to be determined to determine the best pedagogical approaches for teaching different types of knowledge and skills throughout development, research to date has found that having a more nuanced understanding of play that includes guided play can provide the results everyone wants. it's about children's learning. Finally, in studying this question, it is crucial that researchers investigating how children learn collaborate with the teachers and parents who are actually teaching children to develop evidence-based curricula and experiences that best support children's learning.

References

1. Ginsburg KR. The importance of play in promoting the healthy development of children and maintaining strong bonds between parents and children.Pediatrics. 2007;119(1):182-191. doi:10.1542/peds.2006-2697.
2. Singer DG, Golinkoff RM, Hirsh-Pasek K, eds.Play = learn: how play motivates and enhances children's cognitive and socio-emotional growthH. Nueva York: Oxford University Press; 2006.
3. Pellegrini AD, Smith PK. Physical activity play: the nature and function of a neglected aspect of play.Child development. 1998;69(3):577-598.
4. Lillard AS, Lerner MD, Hopkins EJ, Dore RA, Smith ED, Palmquist CM. The impact of pretend play on child development: a review of the evidence.Psychological Bulletin. 2013;139(1):1-34.
5. Alfieri L, Brooks PJ, Aldrich NJ, Tenenbaum HR. Does discovery-based instruction improve learning?Journal of Educational Psychology. 2011;103(1):1-18.
6. Fisher KR, Hirsh-Pasek K, Newcombe NS, Golinkoff RM. Taking shape: supporting preschool children's acquisition of geometric knowledge through guided play. Child development. 2013;84(6):1872-1878.
7. Weisberg DS, Hirsh-Pasek K, Golinkoff RM, Kittredge AK, Klahr D. Guided play: principles and practices.Current Directions in Psychological Science. 2016;25(3):177-182.
8. Weisberg DS, Hirsh-Pasek K, Golinkoff RM. Guided play: where curricular objectives find a ludic pedagogy.Mind, brain and education. 2013;7(2):104-112.
9. Weisberg DS, Zosh JM, Hirsh-Pasek K, Golinkoff RM. Speaking: playing, language and the role of the supportive adult.american gambling magazine. 2013;6(1):39-54.
10. Toub TS, Hassinger-Das B, Nesbitt KT, et al. The language of the game: development of preschool vocabulary through the game after shared reading of books. 2017. Manuscript under review.
11. Cook C, Goodman ND, Schulz LE. Where Science Begins: Spontaneous Experiments in Exploratory Play for Preschoolers.Knowledge. 2011;120(3):341-349.
12. Sim ZL, Xu F. Learning higher-order generalizations through free play: evidence from 2- and 3-year-olds.developmental psychology. 2017;53(4):642-651.

How to cite this article:

Weisberg DS, Zosh JM. How guided play promotes early childhood learning. In: Tremblay RE, Boivin M, Peters RDeV, eds. Pyle A, thematic edition.Encyclopedia on early childhood development[in line].https://www.child-encyclopedia.com/play-based-learning/according-experts/how-guided-play-promotes-early-childhood-learning🇧🇷 Published: February 2018. Accessed December 12, 2022.

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