Conference Proposal: Learning through Play and Imagination

许多研究人员声称，有趣和富有想象力的活动可以促进儿童时期的学习。但这种说法似乎很简单，它留下了一系列关于游戏和想象力如何（甚至是否）有效促进学习的关键问题。这些问题包括：有趣的学习过程究竟是如何起作用的？游戏环节或想象场景的哪个维度对儿童的学习特别有效，为什么？孩子们最容易通过有趣和富有想象力的活动学习哪些主题？在什么年龄？儿童个体的特征（如执行功能、气质）如何与通过游戏和想象学习的过程相互作用？整合信息并回答这些问题对于教育工作者和媒体创作者来说意义重大。为了激发跨学科的讨论，这次为期两天的会议（由儿童发展研究协会共同主办）旨在确定和填补关于儿童从有趣和富有想象力的活动中学习的文献空白，在开放的研究问题上建立跨实验室和分支学科的合作，并就如何最好地利用这些活动来提高儿童的学习和发展提出基于证据的策略建议。通过将传统讲座与互动活动相结合，并积极寻求来自学术学科和实践领域（例如，媒体创作，游乐场和玩具设计）的参与者，本次会议将为参与者提供在游戏和想象中学习和通过游戏和想象学习的广泛研究，深入研究最佳实践，并明确鼓励合作和规划未来的工作，以回答该领域的关键开放性问题。与会者将带着想象力和趣味性学习的零碎概念以及研究和应用这些概念的方式离开会议。这些对话的结果将通过博客文章、开放获取的论文和可公开获取的小册子广泛传播。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Many researchers have claimed that playful and imaginative activities lead to learning in childhood. But this claim is deceptively simple, and it leaves open a host of critical questions about how (and even whether) play and imagination can effectively promote learning. These questions include: How, exactly, does the process of playful learning work? Which dimensions of play sessions or imagined scenarios are particularly effective for children's learning, and why? Which topics do children learn most readily through playful and imaginative activities, and at what ages? How do characteristics of individual children (e.g., executive function, temperament) interact with the process of learning through play and imagination? Integrating information and and answering these questions are important for the implications they hold for educators and media creators . To stimulate cross-disciplinary discussions, this two-day conference (co-sponsored by the Society for Research in Child Development) aims to identify and fill gaps in the literature on children's learning from playful and imaginative activities, build collaborations across labs and subdisciplines on open research questions, and produce proposals for evidence-based strategies for how these activities can best be used to enhance children's learning and development. By combining traditional talks with interactive activities, and by actively seeking participants both from academic disciplines and practice fields (e.g., media creation, playground and toy design), this conference will give participants a wide view research in learning in and through play and imagination, delve into best practices, and explicitly encourage collaborations and planning for future work to answer crucial open questions in this field. Participants will leave the conference with shard conceptualizations of imaginative and playful learning and the ways it could be researched and applied. The results of these conversations will be widely disseminated through blog posts, open-access papers, and publicly available pamphlets.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.