clair073

All children, if given the chance, will play, preferably with other children. The games they play are often creative, rough and tumble, and of course―fun. Some consequences are obvious: ·          Fun is a positively reinforcing emotion. It makes kids happy. ·          Play encourages exploration with fewer constraining boundaries than the drone of regular life. ·          Play is an effective way to socialize and make friends. ·          Play stimulates initiative and engagement, rather than passively observing what others do. But there is another less obvious reason, one that is biological. In a review in the American Journal of Play (yes, there really is a scholarly journal on play), evidence is provided from controlled studies in rats and some primates. These studies show that when young animals are encouraged to play they de...

If we learn anything about educational policy, we should learn that what we have tried over the last couple of decades to improve student achievement doesn’t work very well. I won’t bore you with all the statistics showing that academic ability of U.S. students lags that of most other developed countries and our ranking is not improving. I would like to explore one reason for lack of progress besides faulty federal policy. And that reason is research funding. We don’t know enough about how brains learn and remember, nor how to apply what we do know to educational policy. The recently announced winners of the Nobel Prize included nine from the U.S. In a recent joint interview by leaders of the American Association of Science, the winners spent little time discussing their research achievements, preferring to expound on some serious concerns about how research is now funded in the U.S. Of course, some of these concerns could be considered whining. Like much of the general public, the sci...