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The authors suggest that the recess period serves a positive purpose in the primary school curriculum, counter to the current practice of minimizing recess in many schools across North America and the United Kingdom. The authors' position is embedded in the larger debate about school accountability; they argue that school policy should be based on the best theory and empirical evidence available. They support their argument for the importance of recess with theory and with experimental and longitudinal data showing how recess breaks maximize children's cognitive performance and adjustment to school.
The emphasis on accountability in both preschool and primary school education has increased over the past 40 years, the legislation associated with the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 being perhaps the most visible and recent example. Advocates of accountability suggest-and rightly, we think-that educational practice should be based on empirical evidence and that the scarce tax dollars we have should be spent on those programs that "work." To that end, the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences has recently announced a grant competition to evaluate educational programs that have been shown to be effective (U.S. Department of Education, 2004).
The orientation toward accountability has a number of implications. Perhaps most broadly, schools are organizing schedules so that instructional time is maximized and noninstructional time, such as recess, is minimized. This practice may follow from the assumption that minimizing recess affords more opportunities for instruction, which should, therefore, maximize performance. One of the specific, though less discussed, implications of this stance in the educational research literature (Pellegrini & Smith, 1993; Jarrett & Maxwell, 2000) is the current practice across North America and the United Kingdom of minimizing or eliminating children's opportunities for recess breaks during the school day and their corresponding opportunities to interact with their peers. This issue has been studied (e.g., Blatchford, 1998; Jambor, 1999), but there are gaps in the educational literature, and those gaps have not escaped the attention of the American and British print media (e.g., The Economist, 2001).
Recess in the School Curriculum
The trend toward diminished recess time has been corroborated by at least three surveys. A national survey taken by the National Association of Elementary School Principals in 1989 found that...