Professor of Psychology at UVA
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Articles by Angeline S. Lillard
Why Does Fantasy in Screen Media Deplete Childrenʼs Executive Function?
1 Introduction Lillard and Peterson (2011) and several others have found that children who watched a fast-paced fantasy show scored lower on executive function (EF tasks) immediately after. Hinten et al.' s (2025) meta-analysis substantiates that fantasy, not pace, explains these findings (see Lillard et al. 2015). They conjecture that pace is not detrimental because children get used to seeing fast-paced screen media from a young age; their explanation for why fantasy is disruptive is less clear.
Guided play in pre-K yields better outcomes at a lower cost: The promise of public Montessori schools
The world is changing fast, and education must adapt to prepare children for an uncertain future dominated by AI. What scientists and business people know is that children will need the six C skills: collaboration, communication, content (like how to read and learn), critical thinking, creative innovation, and confidence.
Journal of Montessori Research
We accept submissions for future issues on an ongoing basis. Read more about Spring 2023 issue is now available.
Montessori as an alternative early childhood education
Montessori education was developed over 100 years ago, and persists as a marginal ‘niche reform’ of the standard model. Here I discuss two unresolved dichotomies in early childhood education – the tension between work and play, and between structure and freedom. I explain how Montessori collapses and thereby resolves the dichotomies, and does so in a contemporary theoretical frame – one that is dynamical rather than linear.
When so many school children can’t read, it’s time to do something different
More than half of Texas third graders cannot read at grade level. Might they do better with an entirely different educational approach? Typically we teach children to read, beginning in preschool, and take up writing later. But over 100 years ago, physician-educator Maria Montessori came up with a radically different approach to literacy that makes far more sense based on the last 50 years of research.
Learning from Apps and Objects: The Human Touch
Research Article Sierra Eisen Corresponding Author E-mail address: sle3jt@virginia.edu https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7450-6344 Department of Psychology, University of Virginia Address correspondence to Sierra Eisen Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, P.O. Box 400400, Charlottesville, VA 22904; e‐mail: sle3jt@virginia.edu Search for more papers by this author PDF PDF ShareShare ABSTRACT In three studies, we examined children's geography learning from a physical puzzle and an app...
New study shows Montessori preschools can level the playing field for low-income kids
About 150 years ago, the Western world, in the midst of a major industrial revolution, began an experiment. It started gathering all children during weekdays into rooms where teachers told them what they should know: memorizing letter symbols to read and bits of knowledge to recite and repeat on tests. Learning was rewarded in various ways. Soon the rooms contained only children of a single age, because it was more efficient. Learning had never been like this before.
Playing make-believe can deprive kids of important development
We weren't sure what we'd find — after all, children love to pretend, and they do it a lot. But is it their preference? Or are they doing it because they often have no choice, and it's the next best thing to doing something for real? So we posed the question, and we found a quite clear answer: Children would rather do things for real. Overall, children were twice as likely to choose real as pretend.
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