Speaking of Psychology - Why we learn best through play, with Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, PhD

Episode Date: December 13, 2023

Playtime isn’t just for fun -- psychologists who study children’s learning have found that kids learn best through play. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, PhD, of Temple University, talks about why kids need playtime, what playful learning looks like in a classroom, how technology is changing children’s play, why adults need recess, too, and what parents can do to encourage more play in their kids’ lives. For transcripts, links and more information, please visit the Speaking of Psychology Homepage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you think back to your childhood, do you remember long afternoons of doing not much? Maybe building things with Legos or devoting hours to putting on a play with your dolls? Playtime might seem like it's just for fun and less important than the real work of learning, reading, writing, and arithmetic. But psychologists who study children's learning have found that in reality, children learn best through play. And as the amount of time that kids get to play has shrunk in recent decades. some researchers are hoping to bring playful learning back to children's lives. So why is play so important? What do we learn through play that we can't learn in other ways?

What's the difference between free play and play that's guided by a parent, teacher, or other adult? What does playful learning look like in a classroom? What does it look like at home and in the larger world? How is technology changing children's play? And what can parents do to encourage more play and play learning for their kids. Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life.

I'm Kim Mills. My guest today is Dr. Kathy Hirsch-Pasik, a professor of psychology at Temple University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Dr. Hirsch-Pasik has spent decades studying how children learn through play play, and then bringing that knowledge to parents, educators, and others. She is author of hundreds of scientific articles and 17 books, including the New York Times bestseller, becoming brilliant what science tells us about raising successful children, which, by the way, APA published, and her latest, making schools work, bringing the science of learning

to joyful classroom practice. Dr. Hirsch Passick is an APA fellow and has received numerous awards for her work. She and her team also recently received a $19 million grant from the Lego Foundation in support of their work on playful learning. Dr. Hirsch-Pasick, thank you for joining me today. It is such a pleasure to be here. Kim, you ready to play? You bet. Let's do it. You've done years of research that has found the kids learn best through play. Why is that? What do they learn through play that they don't learn in other ways? Well, let's try to try to Just imagine what you do when you're playing. Now, as a scientist, I play all the time.

I'm pretty curious. I want to know what makes things work. And so I explore. And as I'm exploring things, I'm discovering new things. I'm learning, hmm, how do children think? How do children talk? How do children play? And when I do that, I start to get answers to questions that I might not have even thought

about had I not just been a discoverer, and explore in the real world. And I'd like to argue that it's not just kids play. I think even adults need more play in their life right now. We are so busy all the time that when you say, how are you? It's an okay answer to say, oh, I'm busy. And now I say, I'm so sorry, are you getting any time to explore the world? So what does playful learning look like in a classroom and how can teachers incorporate play into their classes, especially when they feel that they have limited time to teach so much content? Well, you know, you can teach content in a playful way. And that's what we mean by guided play. You can have a learning goal, but you can set up an environment so that the children

do that exploration and discovery. They are the agents of their own learning. So what do we mean by that. We mean that we learn better when you're active, not passive. So think of what school is like often, sitting in chairs and rows. It's not the way human brains learn, so say it, the science. We learn better when we're engaged in what we're doing, not when we're distracted. We learn best when something is meaningful, not when it has no meaning at all to us. When it's socially interactive. We learned that during COVID when it's iterative. We learn a little bit more each time. We're kind of like in jazz when we learn things in different ways. And finally, here's the shocker. We learn things better when it's joyful and not when it's bored. That, I'll just finish the

thought here, is that that is what we mean by active, playful learning. It has a learning goal, But the pedagogy requires that teachers have more fun teaching again, and therefore the kids will have more fun learning again. So I find it easy to picture this when we're talking about elementary school children, but what happens when we get into middle school or a high school? We don't have little kids running around playing with interactive toys to learn. What do you do with the older kids? Well, you actually don't need the interactive toys. As I said, even scientists really are doing guided play all the time. So I'm going to give you an example from my college classes.

In our college classrooms, we use a guided play approach. And I ask students to learn psychology, but to also, while they're learning psychology, learn what I call the Six Seas. And all this was developed with my collaborator, Dr. Roberta Galingoff, from the University of Delaware. So number one is how to get along with other people. Then built on that, which is collaboration, you get communication skills. Do you write well?

Are you able to give good oral communication that's convincing? Built on that is your content. You have to learn the content. It's really important in high school and college, whatever. Built on that is critical thinking. We're not so good at that, whether it's in high school or whether it is in college class. And in fact, AI is teaching that to us right now. We have to know how to critically think our way out of things that are misinformation or real

information. And how about creative innovation? In that world of AI, it's going to be even more important to have the original thought than to be able to just have a thought. And finally, we have to have the confidence to take intellectual risks. all of those things come out of a more guided play or active playful learning approach. So in our classrooms, what I do is I only lecture once a week. And what happens on the other day that we meet?

My undergrads and I have a discussion about a theme. And who gets to choose the theme? My students. Because I can teach psychology, whether it's this term's theme, your brain on art, written by Susan Mag Sammon, which became our textbook, or whether we're teaching about prejudice, which I think a lot of people ought to learn about today, because prejudice and hate and stereotyping are everywhere we can touch, I think, in the world today, or whether we're learning about the computerized you. And so my students engage in the study of these topics

that they care about, and we move toward the learning goal of understanding psychology methodology, but we do it in the context of a theme that they care about. And believe me that two years later, they could take my midterm or my final, and they could ace it. And I challenge any other professor to be able to say that. Throwing down the concept. I am. I am. What about unstructured play, the kind of free play that's not guided by teachers or any adults? What are kids learned from that? Oh, they learn so much. You know, if we want our children to be worker bees as they grow up, then we fill every single moment with what they are supposed to do

and how they're supposed to do it. And that's really good because they will learn how to follow everything that they're told. On the other hand, what we might want are people who are managers and bosses in the future. Now, you don't want every kid to grow up as a boss, certainly not in your living room, certainly not around dinner. but you do want them to know the skills of working with other kids, of organizing things, and of figuring out for themselves that the world around us is really pretty interesting and we don't notice most of it.

And I'm amazed when I watch my kids who haven't had a lot of screen time, my grandkids, and who are playing with their stuffies, that they actually are kind of. coming up with narrative. They're writing stories. They're solving dilemmas. They're learning how to solve world problems. Like I told them the other day about the oil spill. And I said, oh, what are we going to do with this oil spill that just happened in the Gulf?

And they came up with creative solutions. Now they might not be what the engineers would say. But that's okay. In free play, they're mastering all of these skills, including skills. that are so important, and we've been learning more and more about the importance of social skills and social navigation from a social human brain and how that helps us with content. Well, you need to have those relationships. And when our kids are stuck on a playground and they have to figure out how to get Johnny off the swing when they want it,

that is a social navigation. People have been talking for years about how kids' playtime has plummeted, both the time that they get to play in school and free play outside of school. When we were preparing for this interview, we found an article in APA's magazine, The Monitor, that quoted you on this topic back in 2009. I know. It's been going on a long time. But have you seen any improvements since then, or is the trend toward kids getting less playtime in the way? their lives continuing? Well, I think we have to look at what's happened in society. You know, in 2009, we were screaming about what David Alkind wrote about called the hurried

child. I would add to that that we really should be talking about the hurried parent. We have just cobbled our life together so closely, so tightly that we're running kind of on a machine and we think we need to be CEO parents. The result of that, when David first wrote about it, way back in, I think it was the 80s, you know, or maybe the early 90s, was that kids were having activity after activity after activity with no time to even process the activities that they were in. I would say that's happened even more today because there are even more activities to engage in. Add to that, that something dramatic happened in 2007, and that was the invention of the iPhone. Right.

And in 2011, came the invention that piggybacked on that that we call the iPad. And with that came a lot of people who realized that this was their moment. They could create educational material in the form of. of apps and we would have digital, as Disney once called it, edutainment. Now, some of the stuff is good, but I have to say that a whole lot of it is not. And in a paper that Merritt Merritt Meyer wrote out of Jenny Rudetsky's lab and we worked with them on it, we asked, what does make a good educational app and do the 100 most downloaded apps actually have any educational value.

Now I grant it, this is two years old, so maybe everything's changed, but I doubt it. And at that time, only two of the apps actually made it to what we would call in the science. Educational. That's astounding. Now you say, but, okay, a lot of kids aren't spending time on apps, are they? Well, by middle school, they're spending 14 hours a day on this stuff. Now, think about that. That's over a 70-hour work week that they're spending in front of a screen.

Sitting, by the way, often docilely, and maybe sometimes convinced, and APA's written a lot about this, that they're really engaged in social media. Now, the first two things to note about that is that it ain't social if you're not with another person, even though it can mimic it. And the second is, it's a lot of downtime spent on social. screen that isn't being spent out looking at trees, watching ants, running around. So we have to be as parents, I think, more conscious of the balance here. And by the way, we've written about this too, of also balancing what we do as parents. Because we're addicted to these screens as well.

and when we are and our kids see us in front of the screen all the time and not looking in their eyes, their message to the child is, I'm not as important as the screen is. And in fact, I want you to know that for this program, I pulled my grandchildren over Thanksgiving. And I said, well, does it disturb you when adults are on phones a lot? This is a six and eight year old, and they said, yeah. and I said, why? I said, well, we don't get any attention. They're just sitting looking at their phone

and every so often they look up at us. And I said, well, what do you think we should do about those adults? And my six-year-old said, we need to do something. We need to tell them that they are just two-legged screenwatchers and that we need them to look at us. So my point in all of this, Has it gotten worse? I believe it has. There's less recess. There's less time for children to just have downtime, which is when we browse things and learn about the world. And those skills are so very, very important for a social brain. So very important.

A few moments ago, you mentioned research looking at the 100 most popular apps and only two met the test. were actually being useful educationally. Not to be a commercial for anybody, but can you give me an idea of what those apps were, what they did, what made them as good as they are? Yeah, so as I said you before, I look at a series of criteria when I look at media, and I've worked with a lot of media companies now

as we try to flesh this out. Where does the science meet digital media? And it's a very important question that I think we have to ask. So where is the consensus in the scientific literature? As I mentioned before, there's consensus around we learn best when you're active, kind of mind's on, not just swiping, but minds on. When you're engaged, not distracted, that's where the media industry really has a problem. They think that by putting more bells and whistles on things,

the kids will be more entertained. And while it's kind of like digital candy, it isn't good for learning. When it's meaningful, that can be a whole lot of things, but it should be something that's culturally diverse as well so that people can find me in the characters that they're looking at. It's when it's socially interactive where two people can play,

not just being solo. That's not to say you should never do solo. We all play games like solitaire. But I would say that anytime you can play it with someone else, it's a really good thing, where it's iterative, where it keeps like in jazz taking the same theme and playing on it in different ways, not just doing the same thing every time. And finally, when it's enjoyable, when it can elicit joy. If you take those and you have a learning goal in mind, you can craft an app that is actually going to be educational or a, a metaverse activity that's going to be educational or an AI experience that's going to be educational. Short of those, what you're doing is you're providing more edutainment that kids watch passively,

but where they're not as fully engaged, and they just don't learn as much from that. So I won't be an infomercial for the apps that passed, but I will tell you the criteria that kind of make it or break it. Well, let's talk about adults and play, because you did. mentioned a few moments ago that, you know, adults need to play as well. What do we learn as adults through playing? What does adult play look like as compared to learning play for youngsters? Well, I do think scientists play all the time. We're a curious bunch. We ask a lot of questions and we almost always ask questions we don't know the answers to. And that's an important thing, by the way, for parents to consider. When you want to ask

questions. Like ask cool questions. Like, I wonder how many straws it would take to support this glass of water. You know? Like, you have to think about the kinds of building block things that you build that can support something, how easy it is to topple something down. All that's physics. And as scientists, we ask these questions all the time, but adults usually ask kind of simple questions. Like what color is your shirt? What color is the doll's dress? Those are called closed questions in our world. And we want open-ended questions where kids have to really think and give you paragraphs as answers, not just one-word answers. So adults for scientists do that all the time. They ask the next question. They get the next discovery. We can do that too. And our world is so

much more fun when we do it, when we change the rules of the game. We were playing adult games over the holidays. Families often do these. And what are those games? And are there games you can invent that are really fun? So we even had a new game that my son introduced called Consider the Source, where you had to rank things, anything, okay, like car brands, movies on a one to scale and the other people had to guess the number. That was a cool, invented game. And everyone had a blast doing it. So I'm going to put another gauntlet down on your show today. I would like us to all have a little bit more adult recess time. I think we need to invent the concept of adult recess and ask, what would you do if you tuck an hour and a half out of your day? I don't care if you

go to the park. I don't care if you watch the ants and wonder, why are they walking in a straight line? I think if we could see the world a little bit more like our children do, we'd be much more creative people, much more sane people, and parents come along. Give yourself that opportunity, and if you really want to have fun, follow the child's lead and learn how to play again. Now, you're working on a project that aims to bring playful learning into public spaces like bus stops, libraries, laundromats. So let's talk about that. What do those playful learning spaces look like and what do they accomplish? Yes, well, I invite all of you to come and look at playful learning landscapes.com. So believe it or not, one day, I thought, why aren't we showing off

how this play works to people in the real world? The science gets here. hidden in journals, except when you're on a podcast. And then all of a sudden, it has life. And we brought that to life and started this project in 2010 in Central Park. And it was called the ultimate block party. And we had 28 science-inspired activities around the park. And kids and parents came. And we were told that we'd be super lucky if we got 6,000 people to come to Central Park that day and participate in all of our activities. Over 50,000 people came. They had a blast.

We had the Lego exhibit, but all of the blocks were green. So if you had to make something, you had to learn rotation, spatial rotation. We had the robot exhibit that came in from Columbia University, and the kids actually got to see how robots were made. and they played around with the parts to see if their robots would work or wouldn't work. We had the biggest Simon Says that was brought to you by Comcast, and boy, was it large. But guess what? Kids are learning emotional regulation and flexibility when they play a game like Simon says.

We've actually seen it in brain data. So after that, I was sitting around in my honors class, which I told you, we used these approaches in my college classroom. And one of my students said, I need a project. And I said, I wonder, if you went to supermarkets, it made it more fun and more engaging, active, engaging, meaningful, socially. You got it now. What would happen? So we put signs up in the grocery store. Did you know there's a lot of learning in these aisles?

I'm a cow. Okay. So the cow took them around. And when we got to the dairy section, it was really hot. And it said, I'm a cow. do milk. What else has milk? Now, when the signs were down, parents and kids just went to the dairy section. But when the signs were up, we got 33% more conversations than when the signs were down. So we published that work and we were astounded. But one of my friends from the University of

Pittsburgh, Melissa LaBerta, said, oh, come on, do you think you could do STEM? He said, go ahead, try it. So she tries, science, technology, engineering, math, puts up math games in the supermarket, and boom, she gets the same result. So another friend says, well, wouldn't work in laundromats, would it? I said, I don't know, let's try it. So she goes into laundromats and gets, well, you know the answer, the same effect. Well, maybe they don't have a supermarket around. Maybe they only have corner stores. What happens there? University of Chicago, I'm sorry, Northwestern. Susan Hespos tries it and boom, she gets the same thing with co-ops and corner stores. So, hmm, that kind of work.

I wonder what would happen if we went to a bus stop. That's another place where people hang. So we go to the bus stop and wouldn't you know that if we put puzzles at the bus stop, all the kids play with the puzzles and learn STEM skills. If we put a new hopscotch built off the Happy Sad Task, looks like a hopscotch game, then the kids all of a sudden learn flexibility and social emotional control and impulse control.

That's amazing. And we study this. So then one of my former grads, former postdocs, Andy Bustamante, now at University of California in California, Irvine. And he decides he's going to, for 65 bucks, he's going to paint a basketball court. and he paints the basketball court so that the three-throw line, you know, where you throw a free-throw,

that three-point line becomes the one-one, or the four-four. And then you move to the three-quarter, then you move to the half, two-four, and then you move to the quarter, and then you assemble points and everyone's keep score up to a certain score. Boom! And this meant that fifth and sixth graders, who just played this game, for one week in recess, 15 minutes a day. All of a sudden, they were passing tests of a fraction decimal conversion, and he called it fraction ball. So we keep doing this.

We're in hospital waiting rooms. We're all of a sudden parents got off their cell phones and are talking to their kids again about the murals. We're in homeless shelters. And we're now, I think, in 22 cities. And we're in countries around the world. So it's growing, growing, growing. And I hope everyone would like to bring these science-infused games to your city. We're working with communities, and the communities help us build them.

That sounds like a lot of fun and an opportunity for people to interact where they wouldn't normally, you know how we all might go to a bus stop and never talk to the other people. This gives you a reason to be talking to them, which is great. It's exactly. It's what I call the New Public Square. Now, we're taping this episode right at the start of the holiday shopping season. So I want to know if you have any advice for parents on what kinds of toys they might get their kids for the holidays, toys that are fun, but they also encourage learning and growth. Yeah, well, you know, it's really fun.

Just the other day, somebody called me to write a story about smart toys. So it's, you know, it's end of 2023 and AI is with us. And we've learned how to put the chips and the toys. and even before AI, my group and other groups had studied, what's happening with these digital toys? And we got some very clear answers. With the digital toys, it turns out that the parents are cut out of the interaction. The digital toys talk a lot.

And they seem to get the kid engaged, but the kid gets word of them pretty quickly because they're kind of cool for a bit, but they only have routine things that they can say. So as it turns out, I thought, well, I wonder if it's all digital toys this year that are being recommended as holiday toys. What's on the list?

And I was shocked to find that, well, there were a few smart toys in the 10 top sellers this year, most of them were your traditional toys. So let's look at it more closely. The blocks and construction toys are still right up there, along with the train sets. Why? Because to build a train pattern that your train can go on, you need spatial skills. And spatial skills, they actually predict pretty strongly what your later math skills are going to be like.

Hmm. Then you have to know the physics and the spatial skills in order to build. the top tower that won't just topple on you. So construction's good. Well, how about the art toys? Oh, they're still hot. So that's good. The make-believe is still happening,

especially after the Barbie movie, three of the top ten sellers or the Barbie dollhouse and others, where kids engaged in make-believe are learning how to tell narrative stories. And when they learn how to tell narrative stories and make it up themselves, they become better writers, better thinkers, and yes, they learn how to read better. So actually, the standard fair that's been around for a pretty long time are pretty good educational toys.

I guess people didn't know the term educational toys as an advertisement seller at that time, but to be honest, they're still pretty good from a psychological point of view. As long as they're fun, you know, I think you don't want kids to understand that what you're really doing is you're sneaking in some learning. Oh, well, you know, it's all learning at the end of the game, really. Our brain is working all the time. It just turns out that any time we get the chance to really be active learners, to be seeking information, to be curious and creative, that's when we learn the most. and I think as long as we appreciate that in ourselves and in our children, we're going to be better off because not everything is like IKEA furniture

where they tell you exactly where to put it. You know? Although it still doesn't come together. I was going to say to me it still doesn't come naturally, but my point is it doesn't, you know, these things, even in the Lego sets, they give you three things you can make from every one. It's not as much fun otherwise because you just make the one set and then you did it and it's done. Let's talk again about some of these electronic things that are out there, computer-based learning games.

Many elementary schools are using games that are supposed to teach children math or reading as part of the curriculum. Does that count as playful learning or are they just like using a different tool? It's just not chalk on a blackboard. Most of it is just another tool, though there is some really good stuff out there. And if you can find it, there are places like common sense media and all that direct you to a lot of good places. But I would say, be careful. The real key is for kids to have choice and voice. And that kind of agency represents the active domain.

A chance to be social, to have other people to do it with makes a big difference. And we've seen that even in educational apps when kids are working solo versus working together, they actually can learn more. So there is good stuff out there. Schools have found some of it. I don't know that everything has to be a game. You know, some things you just have to learn like the multiplication tables, and that's okay. On the other hand, I do want to be conscious that these more gamified platforms can sometimes be really fun for kids and kids do retain it.

I know there are companies, again, everything that these companies have isn't great, whether it's Meadow or it's Roblox or whatever, that are building a lot of new platforms where the kids get to build the cities and the kids get to build the designs. That gives them choice. And I think those are even more powerful examples of how kids can learn. Because truthfully, you can't build a city if the math doesn't work. You know, you can't put a building on another building. So, you know, those are good ways to learn to. And let's talk about what you're working on now. I mentioned in the intro that you just got a $19 million grant.

Yeah. What are you doing with that money? What are you hoping to learn? Yeah. I mean, it was even better. It was pretty close to $20 million. It was insane. But we're so proud of it and so excited.

And what we're doing is we're working with funding from the Lego Foundation. We are working in four states. And I wish I could say it's just me, but I don't really wish it could say it's just me. Science is a team sport. And I've been, you know, so fortunate over the years to work with the top scientists in the country who have been writing about how to use the best learning techniques for children in schools for a long time. So we're going to be doing a longitudinal study from kindergarten through fourth grade. And we are going to be in Illinois, Texas, California, and Virginia in public school systems.

We've targeted some under-resourced schools. Certainly schools have very diverse populations. And with the team, we've designed how to actually operationalize the active and engaged, meaningful, socially interactive pillars that we use to define guided play and playful learning so that it can be used in a classroom environment. So for one, we think we have to have less whole group instruction and a little bit more of students working. in pairs. So moving not to totally no direct instruction, but less direct instruction in the schools. And when students can see how that works and they're talking to others as they're learning and they have choices and when it's more meaningful and it's more culturally relevant, or let me say, you know, expresses some of the community values is maybe a better way to put it, then I think

they're going to learn better. We're using a coaching system in the schools where we will be working with coaches in each state who will be training coaches and teachers in the particular states. And then as we do that, we hope to leave these methods with the teachers and with the schools so that it can scale up and can be self-sustaining. And the other exciting part of it is, you know, years, I think since no child left behind and even before, we've known that the education system that we have in the United States, and I may say even globally earlier today I got off the phone with UNESCO, and I've also been working with the OECD in Europe, is that our education was fashioned for a prior era. It was fashioned for a time.

when we had assembly lines and where we were talking about a manufacturing perspective. And that's where we get, whether it's our grade systems or whether it's our assessment systems or whether it's students sitting in rows listening passively to, you know, the brilliant person in the front of the room who is dispensing knowledge. And we need to change that model. We now live in an era of computers where kids have access to more information at their fingertips than they've ever had before. And knowledge is doubling and tripling at such a rate, even before AI. It was down to 12 months. All the information that we ever had in the world was doubling every 12 months.

Now there's AI. I mean, forget about it. It's probably every 10 seconds. So in that kind of a world, using an old-fashioned school system with an old-fashioned curriculum isn't going to get our kids to thrive. And the business world has moved on. But as Time magazine has said, if Rip Van Winkle came back today, the only thing that would look familiar is likely the school system. It's made teachers unhappy because they know it's not the way to teach. And we need to trust our teachers again.

We need to create a system where they are happy teaching and don't want to run out the door. We need a system where our kids are prepared for that workplace of tomorrow, to be good collaborators and communicators, to know their content but critically think, to be kids who have creative innovation, to have kids who also know how to take the risk and the confidence and the grit to move on and do things well. When we have a school system that creates those outcomes, which every parent wants for their child, then we're going to be able to mirror what the parents are saying, have a school system that's more modernized and future directed. and where teachers want to teach again. And that's what we hope to bring in this study. Well, that's a tall order, but it's important,

and I hope that you achieve your goals. I'm going to thank you so much for joining me today. This has been really interesting. It's always great playing with you. Well, thank you. We can play again whenever. Just let me know, but we've got to get that adult recess. You know, it's got to be put on the table.

All right. I'm all for it. All right. Cheers. Thanks again. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingof psychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speaking of psychology at APA.org. Speaking of psychology is produced by Lee Wynerman.

Our sound editor is Chris Condyenne. Thank you for listening for the American Psychological Association. I'm Kim Mills.