Pour Bien Faire du Sport (1912): An Important Precursor to Recent Books that Support and Acclaim the Achievements of Women in Sports

A short time before the 2012 London Olympics, the President of the International Olympic Committee declared: ‘Women have the right to practice sport … [W]e must make sure that barriers are broken down.’ Although such words would have greatly troubled Pierre de Coubertin, they would be lauded by his contemporary la Duchesse d’Uzès, who had written in the preface to Pour Bien Fair du Sport (1912): ‘Oh my sisters … have hands that are capable of grasping a rifle or leading a horse … Courage! And above all perseverance.’ Pour Bien Faire du Sport was in many ways a precursor to recent popular books such as Coming on Strong (1994) and Heroines of Sport (2000); however, it has been grossly overlooked. This paper sheds much-needed light upon the book and its messages – and also upon la Duchesse d’Uzès and Pierre Lafitte, whose interests had made its publication possible.     

Guided Play: Where Curricular Goals Meet a Playful Pedagogy

Decades of research demonstrate that a strong curricular approach to preschool education is important for later developmental outcomes. Although these findings have often been used to support the implementation of educational programs based on direct instruction, we argue that guided play approaches can be equally effective at delivering content and are more developmentally appropriate in their focus on child‐centered exploration. Guided play lies midway between direct instruction and free play, presenting a learning goal, and scaffolding the environment while allowing children to maintain a large degree of control over their learning. The evidence suggests that such approaches often outperform direct‐instruction approaches in encouraging a variety of positive academic outcomes. We argue that guided play approaches are effective because they create learning situations that encourage children to become active and engaged partners in the learning process.     

Taking Shape: Supporting Preschoolers' Acquisition of Geometric Knowledge Through Guided Play

Shape knowledge, a key aspect of school readiness, is part of early mathematical learning. Variations in how children are exposed to shapes may affect the pace of their learning and the nature of their shape knowledge. Building on evidence suggesting that child‐centered, playful learning programs facilitate learning more than other methods, 4‐ to 5‐year‐old children (N = 70) were taught the properties of four geometric shapes using guided play, free play, or didactic instruction. Results revealed that children taught shapes in the guided play condition showed improved shape knowledge compared to the other groups, an effect that was still evident after 1 week. Findings suggest that scaffolding techniques that heighten engagement, direct exploration, and facilitate “sense‐making,” such as guided play, undergird shape learning.     

The birth of words: ten-month-olds learn words through perceptual salience

A core task in language acquisition is mapping words onto objects, actions, and events. Two studies investigated how children learn to map novel labels onto novel objects. Study 1 investigated whether 10-month-olds use both perceptual and social cues to learn a word. Study 2, a control study, tested whether infants paired the label with a particular spatial location rather than to an object. Results show that 10-month-olds can learn new labels and do so by relying on the perceptual salience of an object instead of social cues provided by a speaker. This is in direct contrast to the way in which older children (12-, 18-, and 24-month-olds) learn and extend new object names.     

Infants Segment Continuous Events Using Transitional Probabilities

Throughout their 1st year, infants adeptly detect statistical structure in their environment. However, little is known about whether statistical learning is a primary mechanism for event segmentation. This study directly tests whether statistical learning alone is sufficient to segment continuous events. Twenty‐eight 7‐ to 9‐month‐old infants viewed a sequence of continuous actions performed by a novel agent in which there were no transitional movements that could have constrained the possible upcoming actions. At test, infants distinguished statistically intact units from less predictable ones. The ability to segment events using statistical structure may help infants discover other cues to event boundaries, such as intentions, and carve up the world of continuous motion in meaningful ways.