The construct of playful learning in primary mathematics: A literature overview

Abstract

This literature overview aims to define playful learning (PL) in primary mathematics education (ME). When reading previous research literature, I discovered that early years ME researchers often do not define PL but view PL situations regarding teaching opportunities by stating what children learn, such as dealing with counting, operations on numbers, shape, and measuring (Ginsburg, 2006), geometrical thinking (Clements & Sarama, 2014), classification, seriation, conservation, one-to-one correspondence, estimating, quantitative concepts, number words, space-time orientations (van Oers, 1996) to name a few. Of course, what pupils may learn through play is highly important, as education has a learning perspective. However, I argue that PL does not depend on the specific mathematical content. In this literature overview, a total of 2633 studies were screened before reading 61 studies in more detail. When scrutinising the resulting 13 studies and identifying the ME researchers’ common features of PL, my argumentation contrasts with the argument of Brooker et al. (2014), who concludes that a consensus on the definition of PL in early childhood never will be reached. Also, I argue that researchers studying the effectiveness of a PL approach and what mathematical content pupils learn when participating in PL situations could benefit from a definition of what constitutes PL in mathematics in the first place. Therefore, next, I draw on previous research providing insights into key concepts and a further rationale for conducting this literature overview, deliberately labelled an overview, rather than a review, because the interest is not in the studies’ research findings. The aim is purely theoretical; to explore how ME researchers characterise PL to define PL in primary ME.