Resources

What We Know About Play:
A Walk through the Selected Research

Playing for Keeps will be tracking and reporting on this new level of inquiry as results are documented. In the meantime, a couple of papers that may whet the appetite would include:

- Investigations about the use of play as an adaptive mechanism: See "Evolving a Consilience of Play Definitions: Playfully" by Brian Sutton Smith in Play and Culture Studies, Volume 2, edited by Stuart Reifel.

The outcomes of play
Given that play is considered to be best practice in early childhood educational programs, and that new practice innovations need to be field tested in various settings, you can be sure that somewhere out there, researchers are investigating the impact of play.

Among recent studies that have documented that play, in fact, does matter to the healthy development of children are these:

- The value of recess for elementary school children is explored in "What the Research Says about the Need for Recess" by Olga S. Jarrett and Darlene M. Maxwell.