The research in 60 seconds
Six researchers from Danish university colleges set out to answer a simple question: what does the evidence actually say about play and student participation in secondary maths and language teaching (roughly grades 7 to 9)? They searched international and Nordic databases and started with 876 results. After screening, 47 looked potentially relevant, and after full-text review and snowball sampling, nine studies made the final cut. None were set in Nordic classrooms. Most treated play as a loosely defined, positively assumed good rather than something tested or measured, and several didn't engage with play theory at all.
So what?
The most useful thing this review offers is honesty about where the evidence currently stands. Across the nine studies, play is consistently described as a good thing, and its absence is treated as a problem worth solving. What the researchers found is that "play" itself is rarely defined with enough precision to know what's actually being claimed. They borrow a nice phrase for this: play and participation function as "floating signifiers", words everyone nods along to, each meaning something slightly different depending on who's using them.
That's a genuinely helpful thing to know, because it turns a vague feeling many educators already have (that "playful learning" gets used a bit loosely) into something backed by a proper literature search. For school leaders and teachers alike, the practical value is a set of sharper questions to bring to any pitch for playful pedagogy as a proven fix. The enthusiasm out there may well turn out to be justified. Treating it as a promising direction worth testing carefully, rather than a settled answer, is the more useful and more honest position for now.
Editorial note: one Nordic-originated playful method with more developed theoretical grounding, at least in organisational and higher education contexts, is Lego Serious Play. It's a good illustration of what this review is really asking for: a playful approach built on an explicit theory of why it works, rather than an assumption that playfulness is inherently beneficial. This review didn't examine its use in secondary maths and language classrooms specifically, but methods with a clear theoretical foundation are exactly the kind of stronger starting point the researchers are calling for.
For teachers
Get curious about what "play" means in your own context. When a colleague or CPD session credits a playful activity with boosting engagement, it's worth asking what specifically made it playful, and what participation looked like before and after. Building that habit puts you ahead of most of the published research, which the review found skips this step surprisingly often.
Look for learning alongside activity, not instead of it. Busy and engaged aren't automatically the same thing, and checking for both gives you a clearer, more confident read on what a playful activity is actually achieving with the maths, the grammar or the argument at hand.
See the tension between openness and structure as something to work with, not a problem to hide. The review points to a real balancing act between the freedom play needs and the structure secondary curricula demand. Naming that tension with students and colleagues, rather than assuming play resolves it quietly on its own, tends to produce better-designed lessons.
For school leaders
Use this review as a good prompt for sharper questions, especially when playful-pedagogy CPD or initiatives claim to be "proven" to lift engagement or attainment at secondary level. Asking providers where their evidence comes from is a reasonable, welcome question, and a good filter for choosing who to work with.
Keep early years and upper secondary evidence usefully separate. Play research is well established with younger children. Knowing that those findings don't automatically transfer to 13 to 16 year-olds working towards exams helps you evaluate pitches on their actual merits, rather than borrowed credibility.
If you fund internal action research on playful approaches, build in clear definitions of "play" and "participation" from the outset. Doing that well addresses the review's central gap directly, and a school project with genuinely clear definitions would be a valuable, shareable contribution well beyond your own staffroom.
