The World Bank has collected substantial evidence on the decisive role of high quality early educational programs on later success in school and life. Their conclusion is that investing in development during the early years of life is the most profitable educational investment in general. The Finnish national curriculum guidelines for early and preschool education emphasize play as an essential element of child development but play totally disappears from comprehensive school core curricula. Yet neither the effectiveness of play as central to the pre-school curriculum nor the abandonment of play in middle childhood is justified by contemporary research.

Our own research and that of colleagues in Japan and the United States indicates when and why play is important to preschool development and how theoretically guided introduction of how play and narrative forms of children’s activity can enhance comprehensive school education.

We propose to address this issue via two major questions:

1) How are play and narrative activities best organized to promote learning motivation and learning results (literacy, narrative competence, imagination)?

2) How does the importance of play and narrative activities in development and learning change at the beginning of comprehensive school?

We hypothesize that narrative modes of acting during play contributes essential elements of learning motivation that go beyond the preschool years and consequently, that abrupt cessation of these activities in the transition to comprehensive school assignments and tasks eliminates essential parts of learning (e.g. children’s own goal setting skills, personal relation to phenomena in the world as an active learner – sometimes referred to as identity, use of imagination and creativity). We will study the importance of the narrative mode of acting in carefully designed experiments, in which we construct different narrative activity environments in order to compare the learning processes and results with more traditional educational approaches.

There will be three research foci:

1. Literacy learning in grades K – 4,

2. Learning of children with special needs (ADHD) in grades K - 9, and

3. Learning in integrated multi age groups 4 – 8 years.

We expect to demonstrate how learning motivation and academic achievement can be developed proceeding from spontaneous pretending to a transitory form of problem solving supported by narratives. If the children with special needs have difficulties subordinating different impulses and self-control, we expect to be able to develop these abilities in our approach as well as learning motivation of immigrant children. We hypothesize that our evidence and practical recommendation concerning how to develop learning motivation through narrative mode of acting will be helpful in organizing concrete policies for dealing with a major shortcoming of the Finnish educational system: The fact that the number of children with learning difficulties and other special needs is doubled in short time (about 121 000 (21%) in 2005) at the same time other children are attaining top results in international comparative studies of comprehensive school subjects.

International Research Network on Imaginative Education