The effectiveness of playful practice for learning in the early years

Despite the centrality of play within curriculum initiatives for the early years and the significant amount of research interest in play over the last four decades, there remains little empirical support for the relationship between play and learning. Reasons for this paucity include the difficulty of providing an operational definition of play and the issue of isolating the developmental potential of play for experimental manipulation. This paper proposes that both of these problems might be minimised by perceiving playfulness as an approach to an activity, rather than as a set of observable behaviours. The study investigates the effectiveness of playful practice using a problem solving task (timed completion of jigsaw puzzles). Thirty children aged three to five years (mean age 4:7 years) were assigned to either a formal or playful practice condition. The manipulation of cues to construct conditions was based on previous findings about children’s perceptions of play. Results demonstrate that performance is significantly improved through playful practice at both immediate and delayed post-test.