al., 2008; Stockard & Engelmann, 2008; Waldron-Soler et al., 2002). Indeed, children in who participated in the Didactic Instruction System for Reading and Remediation (DISTAR) curriculum outperformed children in the control and experimental groups in reading, math, and language, moving from the 20th percentile to near the 50th percentile (Education Commission of the States, 1999; Ellis & Fouts, 1993). However, when specifically considering academic outcomes, many findings support the claim that preschoolers who engage in playful learning either match or outperform those who learn through direct instruction (for review, see Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, Berk, & Singer, 2009). By way of example, Han, Moore, Vukelich and Buell (2010) found that playful learning enhances vocabulary development in low-income preschoolers relative to more didactic practices. Alfieri, Brooks, Aldrich, and Tenenbaum (2010) reviewed 164 studies comparing discovery-based versus direct instruction approaches to learning and found that assisted discovery approaches trump the kind of learning that emerges from more unassisted pedagogies. Research from our own laboratory suggests that children are better at learning of the criterial properties of geometric shapes like squares and triangles and retaining this knowledge when they participate in activities that are playful (Fisher, Hirsh-Pasek, Newcombe, & Golinkoff, in press). In general, the evidence suggests that playful, child-centered approaches that incorporate some degree of adult scaffolding are more effective teaching strategies for achieving academic outcomes with preschoolers than those involving either direct instruction (Stipek, Feiler, Daniels, & Milburn, 1995) or free play in the absence of active adult guidance (Chien et al., 2010; Honomichl & Chen, in press; Lillard et al., in press; Lillard & Else-Quest, 2006).
tendencies to successfully scaffold their learning. By contrast, environments in which direct instruction dominates set up a different mise for preschoolers, one that implicitly encourages children not venture to far from the specific learning goal at hand (e.g., Bonawitz et al., 2011). The mise en place concept can thus help us to understand why and how pedagogical strategies or combinations of strategies work effectively under certain circumstances. When considering preschool education, we believe guided play presents a superior teaching method, for the reasons outlined above. But a more directly instructional approach has been shown to trump free play and exploration for some learning outcomes, such as science learning in older children (e.g., Chen & Klahr, 1999; Klahr & Nigam, 2004; Klahr, Zimmerman, & Jirout, 2011; Lorch, et al., 2010). Why? We argue that what is needed in any learning situation is the ability of the learner to focus on the dimensions of interest to the current learning goal and to extract the relevant information from the environment. While guided play sets up the right mise for allowing preschool children to do so, direct instruction can be more effective at establishing these constraints for those children who are accustomed to schooling or who have already established a suite of “learning to learn” tools (see also Fuson & Burghard, 2003; Marulis & Neuman 2010). So our answer to the question of why guided play works, perhaps surprisingly, is that there isn’t anything necessarily special about either play in general or guided play in particular that does the work of conveying the academic and cognitive benefits reviewed above. Rather, guided play can be thought of as a metaphor for any type of learning that encourages a learner to be an active and engaged partner in the learning process and that
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