Defining play has plagued researchers and philosophers for years. From describing play as an inaccessible concept due to its complexity, to providing checklists of features, the field has struggled with how to conceptualize and operationalize “play.” This theoretical piece reviews the literature about both play and learning and suggests that by viewing play as a spectrum – that ranges from free play (no guidance or support) to guided play and games (including purposeful adult support while maintaining playful elements), we better capture the true essence of play and explain its relationship to learning. Insights from the Science of Learning allow us to better understand why play supports learning across social and academic domains. By changing the lens through which we conceptualize play, we account for previous findings in a cohesive way while also proposing new avenues of exploration for the field to study the role of learning through play across age and context.
Spatial discontinuity between causes and effects is a feature of many scientific concepts, particularly those in the environmental and ecological sciences. Causes can be spatially separated from their effects by great distances. Action at a distance, the idea that causes and effects can be separated in physical space, is a well-studied concept in developmental psychology. However, the extant literature has focused largely on cases where causes and effects are separated in physical space but are contained within the same attentional space, for instance, how magnets on a table interact or how a lamp projected against an object creates a shadow despite the spatial gap between the lamp, object, and shadow. This paper considers the understanding of causes and effects that are separated both in physical and attentional space-a concept referred to here as "action at an attentional distance." Findings from an in-depth study of second, fourth and sixth graders' (n ¼ 10) reasoning about action at an attentional distance are presented. Children tended to reason locally, but when they did reason about action at an attentional distance, they relied upon mechanism information and prior knowledge. The implications for causal explanation and instructional design are considered. # 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 52: 1003-1030, 2015 Keywords: causal reasoning; causal mechanisms; ecosystems; spatial gaps; scale; systems thinking Spatial discontinuity between causes and effects is a feature of many environmental and ecological issues. Carbon emissions in populated areas contribute to consequences for polar bears in the Arctic. Heavy snow melt and rains in the Northern reaches of the tributaries leading into the Mississippi River result in flooding in New Orleans. Volcanic eruptions in Iceland are presumed responsible for many deaths in Europe in the 1800s and eruptions in one location can disrupt air travel around the globe in the present day.The concept that causal relationships can occur across spatial gaps is referred to as "action at a distance." While it is critical for understanding a range of environmental and ecological phenomena, it is not limited to these concepts. Many scientifically accepted explanations involve action at a distance, for instance, those related to gravitational attraction, magnetism, and electrical fields. Magnets can push and pull each other despite physical distance between them, ocean tides are due to the gravitational attraction of the moon, and the sun plays a central role in photosynthesis and the availability of energy in the food webs on Earth.Understanding "action at a distance" has its challenges. It has been well-studied in the developmental psychology literature, and as elaborated below, this research suggests that from the
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