Pretend play creates smarter students

A leading researcher at University of California at Berkeley says that when children pretend, they're not just being silly. They're doing science. Alison Gopnik wrote about her findings in the Smithsonian magazine. Among her conclusions were the following:

"We found children who were better at pretending could reason better about counterfactuals—they were better at thinking about different possibilities. And thinking about possibilities plays a crucial role in the latest understanding about how children learn. The idea is that children at play are like pint-sized scientists testing theories. They imagine ways the world could work and predict the pattern of data that would follow if their theories were true, and then compare that pattern with the pattern they actually see. Even toddlers turn out to be smarter than we would have thought if we ask them the right questions in the right way."


Read more about Gopnik's research on the Smithsonian website.