Assessment of Play in Preschool-Age Rebelo, Gabriela; Sousa-Gomes, Valéria; Moreira, Diana ...
European psychologist,
2024, Letnik:
29, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The construct of play lacks a universal and consensual
definition, due to its inherent complexity. It is during childhood play is
fundamental to the development of cognitive, social, emotional, ...physical, and
language skills. Therefore, it is pertinent to conduct research on play in
preschool age, seeking to identify predictors of development and methods to
assess the specific components that make up the different dimensions of play.
The evaluation of preschool play, using valid and reliable instruments, supports
the construction of intervention programs that enhance the child's full
development. This systematic review aimed to investigate national and
international instruments and tasks that assess play. The results indicate the
existence of several instruments and tasks at pre-school age. However, the
complexity of the construct still hinders the clear definition of the specific
components to be assessed. There was a prevalence of the assessment of the
social and cognitive dimensions over the assessment of the affective dimension,
which is in line with the perceived frequency of the use of instruments that
assess social interaction during play. So, this systematic review was a valuable
contribution to the development and support of future research on tools for play
assessment, specifically in preschool age.
Constructivist views of cognitive development often converge on 2 key points: (a) the child's goal is to build large conceptual structures for understanding the world, and (b) the child plays an ...active role in developing these structures. While previous research has demonstrated that young children show a precocious capacity for concept and theory building when they are provided with helpful data within training settings, and that they explore their environment in ways that may promote learning, it remains an open question whether young children are able to build larger conceptual structures using self-generated evidence, a form of active learning. In the current study, we examined whether children can learn high-order generalizations (which form the basis for larger conceptual structures) through free play, and whether they can do so as effectively as when provided with relevant data. Results with 2- and 3-year-old children over 4 experiments indicate robust learning through free play, and generalization performance was comparable between free play and didactic conditions. Therefore, young children's self-directed learning supports the development of higher-order generalizations, laying the foundation for building larger conceptual structures and intuitive theories.
Flexible social attention, including visually attending to social interaction partners, coupled with positive affect may facilitate adaptive social functioning. However, most research assessing ...social attention relies on static computer-based paradigms, overlooking the dynamics of social interactions and limiting understanding of individual differences in the deployment of naturalistic attention. The current study used mobile eye-tracking to examine relations between social attention, expressed affect, and behavioral inhibition during naturalistic play in young children. Children (N = 28, Mage = 6.12, 46.4% girls, 92.9% White) participated in a 5-min free play with a novel age- and sex-matched peer while mobile eye-tracking data were collected. Interactions were coded for social attention and expressed affect and modeled second-by-second, generating 4,399 observations. Children spent more time dwelling on toys than on peers or anywhere else in the room. Further analyses demonstrated children were almost twice as likely to gaze at their peer when simultaneously self-expressing positive affect. Additionally, children were more than twice as likely and more than three times as likely to self-express positive affect when dwelling on peer or in the presence of peer-expressed positive affect, respectively. Behavioral inhibition was not significantly related to social attention. However, children higher in behavioral inhibition were less likely to self-express positive affect in the presence of peer-expressed positive affect. The current results provide a snapshot of relations between social attention, expressed affect and individual differences during play and provide guidance for future work assessing the roles of social attention and positive affect in facilitating positive social interactions.
This study examined toddlers' autonomy- and connectedness-oriented behaviors and mothers' encouragement of autonomy and connectedness in two cohorts (1995 and 2008) in urban China. Observational data ...were collected from Chinese children and their mothers in a laboratory free play session. The results showed that compared with children in the 1995 cohort (207 children, 95 boys, Mage = 24.09 months), children in the 2008 cohort (281 children, 144 boys, Mage = 24.34 months) displayed fewer connectedness-oriented behaviors and spent more time on autonomous activities. Compared with mothers in the 1995 cohort (45% with a college education), mothers in the 2008 cohort (43.4% with a college education) were less likely to display involvement in children's activities and more likely to encourage child autonomy. The results suggest that macrolevel contexts may play an important role in shaping parenting and children's behaviors.
With more low-income children in the United States participating in center-based early childhood education programs than ever before, understanding the features of preschool classrooms that promote ...positive and equitable outcomes for children is of increasing concern to education researchers. Relatively little empirical work, however, has considered the role that characteristics outside of preschool walls might play in shaping low-income children's learning and development early in life. This study uses novel administrative data to characterize the institutional resources, indicators of social organization, and structural determinants of development for the neighborhoods surrounding 195 preschools across nine U.S. cities. Using latent profile analysis, preschool neighborhoods were grouped into four profiles reflecting different combinations of community characteristics. These neighborhood profiles predicted low-income preschoolers' (N = 1,230; M age = 4.18 years) language/literacy, executive function, and approaches to learning at the end of the 2009 or 2010 academic year, with particularly positive outcomes in communities characterized by high physical disorder and unaffordability, as well as in those marked by high community resources and physical order and low residential mobility. Findings highlight the multidimensional realities of low-income children's preschool community environments and offer new directions for characterizing educational contexts.
Educational Impact and Implications StatementThe results of this study suggest that the neighborhoods surrounding low-income children's preschools are characterized by different combinations of positive and negative features, pushing back against the idea that such environments are universally disadvantaged. The combinations of these preschool neighborhood features appear to meaningfully relate to children's school readiness skills, with particularly positive outcomes observed in communities characterized by high physical disorder and unaffordability, as well as in those marked by high community resources and physical order, and low residential mobility. These findings highlight the important role that children's experiences outside of their schools' walls likely play in shaping their development and learning.
Humor is a central feature of close and intimate relationships in childhood. However, fundamental questions regarding the relationship between humor production, pretend play, and social understanding ...have been overlooked. In a selected subsample from a prospective longitudinal study of first-born children (N = 110, M age = 6.91 years, 46.4% female, 98.1% parents identified as English, Welsh, Scottish, or Irish), we conducted detailed observational coding of children's humor production during dress-up play with younger siblings. Focal children also completed a battery of social understanding tasks that measured emotion understanding and second-order belief understanding. Focal children were also observed during solo free play with Playmobil, and their spontaneous references to others' cognitions and play with objects were coded. Correlation analyses indicated that children's word play with their sibling was associated with their tendency to engage in pretense during solo play. Regression analyses showed that humorous sound play with siblings was associated with their emotion understanding and playful teasing with siblings was associated with their spontaneous references to others' cognitive states during solo free play. Our findings contribute to knowledge and theory regarding domains of development associated with humor production in childhood.
Play is critical for children's development but is the target of significant gender stereotyping. Early in life, parents must navigate these stereotypes on behalf of their children. This study ...examined typologies of caregivers' judgments toward their infants' future engagement with toys and activities considered typical of same- and different-gender peers, and whether these judgments indicated qualities of the child-rearing environment. We conducted a latent profile analysis on a sample of 501 families with infant children in a large city in the Western United States (501 mothers, 388 fathers; 69% White, 16% Latinx, 8% African American). Results showed that parents could be classified as androgynous, stereotyped, counterstereotyped, or gender-impartial in their preferences for their child's toys and activities. Mothers who displayed androgynous and counterstereotyped preferences-primarily conveying approval different-gender-typed play-were rated higher on objective assessments of the quality of the home environment and parent-child interactions. How parents orient to cultural gendered messages for children's play may have implications for the overall parenting environment. We discuss implications for research and practice.
This study examined whether fathers' and mothers' sensitivity toward sons and daughters varies depending on whether they play with stereotypical girls' toys or boys' toys. In a sample of 144 ...predominantly White Dutch families with a child aged 4-6 years, fathers' and mothers' sensitivity was observed during two free play episodes while they played with their son or daughter. One play episode was with stereotypical boys' toys, and the other was with stereotypical girls' toys. Results showed that mothers' but not fathers' sensitivity scores, depended on whether they played with a son or daughter and whether they played with stereotypically boys' toys or girls' toys. Mothers were more sensitive to their daughters when they played with girls' toys than with boys' toys. In addition, mothers playing with daughters were more sensitive than mothers playing with sons when they played with girls' toys. Mothers' differential sensitivity during gender-typed play could be a gender socialization practice that subtly contributes to gender inequality in societal roles and careers, especially for daughters.
Given the substantial heterogeneity across studies on parent-child play, we comparatively explored father-child and mother-child play while controlling for effects of the play settings in two diverse ...situations. We pursued three open questions: (a) how play behaviors inherently differ between the parents, and (b) relate to play quality, and (c) what does this mean for the parent-child relationship? Father-child and mother-child play was separately instructed and videotaped in 80 two-parent families with children aged 18-58 months (44 boys). We offered a physical and a cognitive game, and analyzed each parent-child dyad after rating 10 characteristic parental play behaviors (Encouraging, Surprising, Teasing, Explaining, Confirming, Instructing, Restricting, Lampooning, Sound-Imitating, and Caressing) and three subscales of the Play Quality scale (Piskernik & Ruiz, 2018). External observers also assessed father- and mother-child relationships with the Attachment-Q Sort (Waters, 1995). Results suggest that types of game, rather than parent gender, predicted parental play behaviors. Parents differed in behaviors typical for involving children mentally (e.g., parents explained, confirmed, and surprised) or are popular for stimulating children physically (e.g., parents frequently encouraged, limited restrictions, and imitated sounds). High levels of encouraging and confirming behaviors were related to high quality across games with frequent bouts of teasing. During cognitive games, fathers obtained lower quality than mothers, yet both showed the same quality levels in physical games, where fathers, however, were less instructive and more restrictive while also caressing. High play quality in both games was not associated with mother-child but linked to father-child attachment.
For both adult and child readers of English, the first letter of a word plays an important role in lexical identification. Using the boundary paradigm during silent sentence reading, we examined ...whether the first-letter bias in parafoveal preprocessing is phonologically or orthographically driven and whether this differs between skilled adult and beginner child readers. Participants read sentences that contained either a correctly spelled word in preview (identity; e.g., "circus"), a preview letter string that maintained the phonology but manipulated the orthography of the first letter (P+ O− preview; e.g., "sircus"), or a preview letter string that manipulated both the phonology and the orthography of the first letter (P− O− preview; e.g., "wircus"). There was a cost associated with manipulating the first letter of the target words in preview for both adults and children. Critically, during first-pass reading, both adult and child readers displayed similar reading times between P+ O− and P− O− previews. This shows that the first-letter bias is driven by orthographic encoding and that the first letter's orthographic code in preview is crucial for efficient, early processing of phonology.
Public Significance Statement
It is known that encoding the first letter of a word is particularly important for a reader to accurately identify that word, but the reason for this has not previously been understood. We showed that the importance of the first letter of a word is based on the accurate encoding of its printed form (orthography) and is not due to the reader correctly encoding the letter's associated speech sounds (phonology). We showed that this is true for both skilled adult readers and beginner child readers of English.
