Recess

Its Role in Education and Development

Anthony D. Pellegrini

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781317441458
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Writing a book about recess could be a very questionable endeavor for a serious academic psychologist. At first blush it seems to be a pretty trivial topic. It's the time during the school day where there's a break from what's typically considered the most serious work of the day--reading, writing, and arithmetic. Reflecting this trivial tenor, it's also that time of the school day that kids--perhaps only half jokingly--say is their favorite part of school. This perception has lead many schools to question the role of recess in the school day. This book is an attempt to broach two views of recess--the perceived value of recess and the movement to eliminate or reduce the school recess period from the primary school day.

Due to tightened school budgets and the emphasis on testing, many elementary schools eliminate recess, gym classes, and play periods to the developmental detriment of the very children the schools are supposed to serve. Author Anthony Pellegrini has conducted a number of careful studies regarding student attentiveness and performance within programs that have recess periods, and those that don't. The data show that students need recess in order to blow off energy and interact with each other in the unstructured recess environment in order to grow socially. The goal of Recess is to help readers realize the importance of recess and counter the trend to eliminate it from schools.

This book appeals to academics, teachers, administrators, and parents.

Chapter 1

The Debate Over Recess: A Sad Tale of the Disjuncture Between Educational Policy and Scientific Research

In this chapter, I begin with an outline of the “recess debate.” I present cases from both the United States and the United Kingdom (UK) because the debate in both places began around the same time (the early 1980s) and revolves around very similar issues. First, I spell out the arguments presented by the “antis”—those individuals who want to minimize the place of recess in the school day. Next, I present data on the frequency and duration of recess periods in schools across the USA and the UK. I also present parallel discussion of the USA and UK cases because I’ve spent a great deal of time in the UK studying kids’ play and recess behavior. In the third section, I present a personal history, of sorts, of my interest in the topics of children’s play and recess in schools.

I then present a brief overview of theories used to generate hypotheses about the role of recess and play in children’s learning and development. Theories are needed to guide us in understanding the phenomena. Theories also provide road maps to the questions we ask within the scientific enterprise. That is, theories offer us a frame around which to understand the data generated in empirical research. The quip, “there is nothing as practical as a good theory,” is very true. Without theory, we cannot ask good scientific questions, make sense of our data, or progress toward a deep understanding of our areas of study.

Finally, this chapter and each one to follow ends up with a series of questions and issues to “Think About.” The intent of this section is to stimulate discussion among people who’ve read the book (kind of like the discussion questions presented in book clubs). Ultimately, I hope these issues will stimulate action to keep recess in schools.

THE DEBATE OF THE ROLE OF RECESS IN SCHOOLS

It has been a “given” for as long as most of us can remember that recess is part of the primary school day. Walk around 19th-century primary school buildings in the UK and early 20th-century American schools, especially in cities, and you might notice the quaint labels over the school house doors on different sides of the schools. The labels tell us that “Boys” and “Girls” had separate entrances to the schools. In fact this was because boys and girls had different play areas for their play breaks during the school day.

Breaks during the school day, like breaks from work on the factory assembly lines, have been with us for at least for as long as each of those institutions has existed. Indeed, the rationale for breaks in each of these work places is similar: After a reasonable amount of work, you need a break. You need a break, if for no other reason than because breaks may help you be more productive. If you’ve never worked on an assembly line or do not remember your primary school days, perhaps you can remember driving on a long trip. You probably remember that the longer you drove the less attentive (and less safe) you became. You pull over for a rest, or break, and start over again, being more attentive (and safer). This is related to the laws in many states governing the length of time truckers (and airline pilots) can drive without a break.

The “Anti’s”

This rather simple but powerful message has not deterred the movement to eliminate or minimize the recess period from the school day. The reasons given, most often by “no nonsense” superintendents of schools and politicians (not often by teachers, parents, or kids) are as follows: Recess is a waste of valuable time—time that could be more profitably used for instruction; and moreover, the playground at recess is the place where kids get bullied and aggression is learned.

The first argument, that recess is a waste of instructional time, is the one that politicians and superintendents use to demonstrate that they mean business in making schools more effective. I remember vividly a number of years ago when then superintendent of the Atlanta Public Schools, Benjamin Canada, and I encountered each other on the Good Morning America TV show. The section of the show was to address the role of recess in schools. I was touted as the expert on recess, whereas Mr. Canada had made national news for his policy of eliminating recess in Atlanta schools and replacing it with physical education. His claim was that by eliminating recess from the whole school system, he had raised kids’ achievement scores. Recess, he said, was a waste of time, and kids did not learn by “hanging on monkey bars.” They could “blow off steam” in physical education, and as part of this package, they could also learn some skills. When pressed by both me and the TV host, who I inferred was sympathetic to the recess cause, about exactly what he meant by achievement going up as a result of eliminating recess, he began equivocating. He equivocated because he had no data. Indeed, there is no evidence to support his claim! The Atlanta school system did not carry out a systematic study tying the elimination of recess to increased achievement, at least that I’m aware of.

As we will see later in this book, the evidence is exactly the opposite of Mr. Canada’s claims. That is, in numerous controlled experiments, children’s attention to school tasks decreased the longer they were deprived of a break, and they were significantly more attentive after a recess than before! Kind of like driving on a long highway trip, isn’t it?

Furthermore, the idea of replacing recess with physical education has been denounced by a national organization of physical education teachers—certainly a group that would have a vested interested in promoting physical education (Council on Physical Education for Children, 2001). As I discuss in more detail later, one of the values of recess is that it provides a break from stringent instructional regimens. Physical education, like other instructional disciplines, rightfully, imposes rigorous demands on children and adolescents so as to stretch their skills. After such demands, a break is necessary. Remember the example of driving on the long car journey.

Also, the idea that children, or any other animals for that matter, need to “blow off steam” is without scientific merit. Such hydraulic models of learning and growth have no current scientific credibility (Evans & Pellegrini, 1997). I discuss this in greater detail later in this chapter.

In short, there is, to my knowledge, not one bit of scientific data to support the sort of claims Mr. Canada made. Why do people make claims that are totally lacking in empirical support? I can only speculate, but it probably makes good grist for the political mills and media sound bites. It sends a “tough love” sort of message, if there are data to support the tough love—I’d advise to hold your nose and swallow—but there simply is no evidence. The specifics of the empirical research addressing the role of recess in learning are addressed in chapters 7 and 8.

And perhaps more cynically, children are a vulnerable population. They have little power in relation to superintendents and little recourse to challenge such dicta. It rests with parents, guardians, and other concerned adults to exert pressure. As I argue, this group of adults should demand accountability from their school leaders on policy that they advocate. They should demand that all educational policy be “evidence-based,” to use a current buzz word. The assumption here, I assume, is that earlier policies were something other than evidence-based (which was and is true with recess policy). Tax and tuition dollars, as well as student and teacher time, should not be expended on practices with little or no evidence supporting their implementation, especially when the policies that they are trying to replace do have evidence to support them. We would not advocate building a road or a bridge or instituting a surgical procedure without such support. Are kids in school any less important?

The next popular claim in the “anti’s” argument against recess is that recess, especially playground recess, is the place where kids get bullied. Though kids do get bullied on the playgrounds, they also get bullied in cafeterias, hallways, toilets, locker rooms, and other places where there is little adult supervision (Pellegrini, 2002). Even in these cases, the base rate of aggression on playgrounds is incredibly low. Specifically, of all the behaviors observed on preschool and primary school playgrounds in many countries, such as Canada, the USA, and the UK, physical and verbal aggression accounts for less the 2% of all behavior (Pellegrini, 1995; Smith & Connolly, 1980). These are very good odds! Indeed, if you could bet on aggression not occurring on the playground, I’d recommended placing many bets, as you’d be very rich: 98 of every 100 behaviors would not be aggression!

Some adults may confuse children’s rough-and-tumble play on the playground as aggression. Rough-and-tumble play is a form of play fighting, and as I discuss in a separate chapter, is not aggressive for the majority of children nor does it tend to “escalate” into aggression.

That rates of aggression are low at recess does not mean that there are not cases of aggression that damage kids; we can have high intensity levels even when rates are low. Like other forms of school violence, such as the all too frequently observed school shootings, they do not happen often, but when they do, people get hurt. Adult supervision of recess periods, like adult supervision of the cafeteria and the hallways between classes, has a potent effect on dampening aggression.

The flip side of the negative behavior argument is that recess is one of the only times during the school days when children have the time and opportunities to interact with their peers on their own terms. Children learn social skills, such as how to cooperate and compromise and how to inhibit aggression, by interacting with other kids. They do not learn them by getting lectures on the topic or by having a course of “values education”! In chapter 3, I discuss the value of recess for children’s social skills learning and development.

A PERSONAL HISTORY OF MY RESEARCH ON RECESS

As a “serious” academic psychologist (most of the time, at least) concerned with children’s education, learning, and development, some popular pictures of recess may present some problems. At one level, I should be studying the ways in which children learn and develop in school. Studying the ways in which children learn to read and write seems a more legitimate venue for an educational psychologist.

Because I have studied the role of children’s play in their social and cognitive development for many years, it was an easy extension to recess, especially as I spent time studying the play fighting (Pellegrini, 2003; Pellegrini & Smith, 1998) and games of boys and girls on their school playgrounds (Pellegrini, Kato, Blatchford, & Baines, 2002).

What really piqued my interest in the topic of school recess was the “debate” over the role of recess that emerged in the early 1990s in the State of Georgia (well before Benjamin Canada’s claims on Good Morning America) and the simultaneous use of standardized tests as the sole criterion for promotion from kindergarten to first grade. As part of this very questionable (in my view, at least) venture, there was talk of eliminating recess so kids could spend more time on the “important skills” necessary to pass the test. Their logic was as follows: Kids’ test scores are declining, and given the limited number of hours in the school day, it made clear sense to eliminate (or minimize) a practice that was viewed as trivial (at best) or antithetical to the more serious educational enterprise.

My first reaction to the testing question was disbelief. I could not believe that such an ill-informed policy (to put it mildly and politely) could be implemented. We’ve known for decades, for example, that kindergartners are unreliable test takers (Messick, 1983). By this I mean that kids tend not to perform consistently across time. They could score in the 99th percentile on Tuesday and in the 65th percentile on Wednesday. (This actually happened to my daughter.) Young kids are simply susceptible to too many distractions to be reliable test takers.

For example, Anna, a kindergarten student, may be having a very bad day because her mother made her wear her green socks to school; she wanted to wear her red socks, not her green ones, so she left home very upset. When Anna gets to school, she is still feeling bad and chooses not to put her “all” into the test. The test is simply not motivating enough for Anna to change her state of mind. The morning incident of the socks could cause such a swing in test scores from Day 1 to Day 2. Being susceptible to such swings in motivation means that young children are often unreliable test takers. Without reliability we cannot have validity, or truthfulness, in our assessment. That is, if test scores change from day to day, they tell us nothing about the truthfulness of the scores.

That children are unreliable test takers is an important reason for educators to use a number of different assessment strategies. That is, tests can and should be used but in conjunction with other measures, such as attendance, grades, teacher assessments, and behavioral observations of competence. When all of these things are aggregated, we get a more valid picture.

At the time of this kindergarten testing debate (or debacle), I had been studying kids’ (beginning in kindergarten) rough-and-tumble play on the school playground during recess for a few years. As part of this research, I also had access to kids’ test scores from kindergarten through at least first grade. I also knew that what kids did on the playground requires pretty high levels of social cognitive competence. So, I wondered if what kindergarten children did on the playground could be a valid predictor of their first-grade achievement as measured by a standardized tests. That is, does kindergarten kids’playground behavior predict their first-grade test scores, even after we control statistically for children’s academic achievement in kindergarten? In essence, I was asking if there was predictive academic value in what kindergarten kids did at recess, beyond that information provided in their kindergarten academic achievement as measured by a standardized test score. How much did it tell us, beyond their kindergarten test scores, about how well they’d do in first grade?

My hunch, or hypothesis, was that the recess behavior would tell us a great deal. After all, when kids are on the playground they are typically interacting with their peers and to do so takes some pretty sophisticated skills. For example, to play cooperatively with their peers, children have to be able and willing to see things from their peers’ perspective, use compromise to resolve conflicts, follow rules of play and games, and use language to negotiate all of this. Indeed, we know that the types of language that kids use to negotiate conflicts and compromise are very similar to the language of school instruction (Heath, 1983) and the language of literacy (Pellegrini & Galda, 1982).

Further, during play and games with their peers, kids are motivated to marshal their social cognitive resources to meet these demands. Kids, generally, like to interact with their peers at recess so they try their best to initiate and sustain play. For example, they may have to compromise (share a toy or a turn) to continue to play with their best friend. They typically do this because they are motivated to do so, perhaps more so than to perform on an achievement test. Tests, at least for most young kids, are not that motivating! My guess is that they are not aware that performance on these tests in kindergarten may jeopardize their chance for admission to Princeton in 15 years!

As I will discuss later, these kindergarten behavio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Debate Over Recess: A Sad Tale of the Disjuncture Between Educational Policy and Scientific Research
• 2 A Brief History of the Place of Play and Recess in American Schools
• 3 The School Playground as a Venue for Children’s Social Development
• 4 The Two Worlds of the Playground: Gender Segregation at Recess
• 5 Gender Differences in Preference for Outdoor Recess
• 6 Children’s Play and Rough-and-Tumble Play on the Playground
• 7 Children’s Games on the Playground at Recess
• 8 The Role of Recess in Children’s Cognitive Performance in Classrooms
• 9 Summing Up: What Are the Implications of Recess for Children in School?
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index