Play = Learning: How Play Motivates and Enhances Children’s Cognitive and Social-Emotional Growth

Why is it that the best and brightest of our children are arriving at college too burned out to profit from the smorgasbord of intellectual delights that they are offered? Why is it that some preschools and kindergartens have a majority of children struggling to master cognitive tasks that are inappropriate for their age? Why is playtime often considered to be time unproductively spent?

In Play=Learning, top experts in child development and learning contend that the answers to these questions stem from a single source: in the rush to create a generation of Einsteins, our culture has forgotten about the importance of play for children’s development. Presenting a powerful argument about the pervasive and long-term effects of play, Singer, Golinkoff, and Hirsh-Pasek urge researchers and practitioners to reconsider the ways play facilitates development across domains. Over forty years of developmental research indicates that play has enormous benefits to offer children, not the least of which is physical activity in this era of obesity and hypertension. Play provides children with the opportunity to maximize their attention spans, learn to get along with peers, cultivate their creativity, work through their emotions, and gain the academic skills that are the foundation for later learning. Using a variety of methods and studying a wide range of populations, the contributors to this volume demonstrate the powerful effects of play in the intellectual, social, and emotional spheres.

Play=Learning will be an important resource for students and researchers in developmental psychology. Its research-based policy recommendations will be valuable to teachers, counselors, and school psychologists in their quest to reintroduce play and joyful learning into our school rooms and living rooms.

Dorothy G. Singer received her doctorate in School Psychology from Teachers College, Columbia University. She is Senior Research Scientist, Department of Psychology, Yale University. She is also Co-Director, with Jerome L. Singer, of the Yale University Family Television Research and Consultation Center. An expert on early childhood development, television effects on youth, and parent training in imaginative play, she has written 20 books and over 150 articles. Her latest books with Jerome L. Singer are Handbook of Children and the Media, Make-Believe: Games and Activities for ImaginativePlay, and Imagination and Play in the Electronic Age. She co-edited, with Edward F. Zigler and Sandra J.Bishop-Josef, Children’s Play: Roots of Reading, which was selected for CHOICE’s Outstanding Academic Title list. She co-authored, with Kathy Kirsh-Pasek, Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, and Laura E. Berk, A Mandate for Playful Learning in Preschool: Presenting the Evidence (OUP 2009). Singer received the award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to the Media by Division 46 of APA in 2004.

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff obtained her doctorate from Cornell University. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh’s Learning Research and Development Center, she joined the University of Delaware. She holds an H. Rodney Sharp Chair in the School of Education, with joint appointments in Psychology and Linguistics. A Guggenheim Fellow and a James McKeen Cattell award winner, she has written dozens of journal articles, chapters, and academic books, including Action Meets Word: How Children Learn Verbs (OUP 2005), edited with Kathy Hirsh-Pasek. She co-authored, with Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Dorothy G. Singer, and Laura E. Berk, A Mandate for Playful Learning in Preschool: Presenting the Evidence (OUP 2009). Committed to dissemination, Golinkoff lectures internationally and has written two popular press books with Kathy Hirsh-Pasek: How Babies Talk and Einstein NeverUsed Flash Cards: How Our Children Really Learn and Why They Need to Play More and Memorize Less, which was awarded the Multiple Sclerosis Society’s Books for a Better Life award. Play=Learning is that book’s mantra.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek is the Stanley and Debra Lefkowitz Professor in the Department of Psychology at Temple University, where she serves as Director of the Infant Language Laboratory. She received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Pittsburgh and her Ph.D. from University of Pennsylvania. Her research in the areas of early language development and infant cognition has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health and Human Development, resulting in 9 books and numerous publications. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Society, serves as the Associate Editor of Child Development, and is treasurer of the International Association for Infant Studies. With Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, she is co-editor of Action Meets Word: How Children Learn Verbs (OUP 2005) and co-author of How Babies Talk and Einstein Never Used Flashcards: How Children Really Learn and Why They Need To Play More and Memorize Less. She co-authored, with Dorothy G. Singer, Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, and Laura E. Berk, A Mandate for Playful Learning in Preschool: Presenting the Evidence (OUP 2009). Hirsh-Pasek has published more than 100 professional articles and has given over 80 invited lectures around the world.