Ingredients for Success

This blog was co-written by Brittany Thompson (and posted on her blog here) and Thalia R. Goldstein. This blog describes an academic paper, recently published in The American Journal of Play, here.

Child Playing in Sand

Source: Pixnio/Free Images

Preschool-aged children are almost always in an imaginary world—pretending to cook dinner, slay dragons, heal their stuffed animals’ many ailments, and run from the active lava flow in their living rooms. This type of play has been extensively researched, with many studies finding links between pretense and outcomes such as social skills, language skills, and cognitive development. However, this research has also recently come under criticism for methodological concerns, and it is not clear whether pretend play may cause developmental change in young children versus simply occur at the same time as developmental change (Lillard et al., 2013). To pinpoint pretend play’s direct connections to important developmental milestones for young children, studies have to carefully measure, change, and isolate specific characteristics of pretend play and compare pre- and post-play child outcomes. The best way to do this may be to create interventions which focus on specific elements of pretend play, and then conduct well controlled, randomized experiments of those interventions. In this blog, we discuss the development and creation of such an intervention. The positive effects of this intervention for children’s emotional control have been reported on this blog here, and in peer-reviewed publication here.

Developing Intervention Theory

The first step in the development of any intervention program is to focus on the theoretical grounding of the central activities of the intervention and the goal outcomes. Because of previous work linking theatrical activities and acting to social-emotional skills such as empathy and emotional regulation, we looked to previous publications in the world of drama and sociodramatic pretend play, and the scientific literature on children’s developmental emotional control and empathy.

Within theories of children’s play, several important guiding principles are critical to keep in mind. The first is the idea that guiding children through play aids their development by assisting them to reach a set goal (Weisberg, Hirsh-Pacek, & Golinkoff, 2013). Theories of guided play served as the basis for the training of play leaders who were taught how to suggest roles for children to play to facilitate children’s progression to higher levels of drama and pretend play. The second is that artistic theory (drawn from drama pedagogy) proposes how to structure activities from less complex to increasingly difficult over the course of the intervention, scaffolding children’s skills such that one day’s activities build upon the activities from the day before. Pretend play theory suggests that engaging children at multiple levels of play is essential, so they incorporate lower level skills, such as object substitution (treating one object as if it were something else), as they embark upon higher level skills, such as coordinated role play. The third is based on intervention theories more generally: requirements for numbers of participants in the intervention should be flexible, such that it can be done in pairs, small groups, or large groups depending on the leaders and children present on a given day. Minimal training for play leaders guiding the intervention is essential to allow the intervention to be generalizable to many different teachers and researchers, without access to extensive training. These two principles can be useful in the successful implementation of all types of interventions in early childhood educational settings. Finally, because we were interested in outcomes including emotional understanding both in the self and in others, games included exploration of characters, mental states, and emotions within fictional worlds.

Developing Intervention Activities

The games used in the present intervention were developed through extensive review of books and blogs discussing and listing dramatic play games for children. A large list of activities suitable for 4-year-old children (the target age group) was made. The final activities were those which focused on discussions of emotions and mental states (due to the goal of improving social and emotional skills in young children), the ability to include four children and a group leader in the activity, and age appropriateness. After a final list was made, discussions amongst the involved researchers resulted in a ranking of “easy,” “medium,” or “hard” for each activity.

The “easy” activities mostly involved just following the instructions provided by the group leader. The “hard” activities were those that gave the children a lot of freedom to create for themselves or had a large variety of characters and props which children could build upon with their imagination. Children began with the easy games, then progressed through the activities until they were engaging in the most complex games at the end of the 8-week intervention. To guide this intervention, a manual was created for each game, ordered by day of the intervention, with instructions for group leaders on how to introduce the game, how to guide the children, and suggestions for following the children’s lead or bringing them back on task when they were distracted.

Developing Control Group Conditions

To isolate the influence of this exploration and embodiment of characters, children who participated in the dramatic pretend play interventions were compared to those who participated in parallel block playing and story reading activities. Developing control conditions for interventions is essential to isolate the specific ingredients in the activity of interest that may be responsible for skill improvement. Books, blogs, scientific findings and theoretical work on the activity of interest can illuminate which specific components are theorized to be related to development.

In this intervention, the theorized ingredients for effective development included group interaction, adult guidance, physical movement, thinking about characters and stories, thinking about and engaging with emotions, and embodiment of characters, mental states, and emotions. The dramatic pretend play games are also fun and engaging, so control conditions needed to be equally as appealing to young children. Based on these ingredients of the dramatic pretend play games, two control conditions were developed: block playing and story reading. The block play intervention was parallel to the pretend intervention because it involved physical movement, group interaction, and guidance from adults, but was different because it did not include physical taking on of roles or discussion of characters, stories, or emotions. On the other hand, the story reading intervention was different from both the block play and pretend interventions because it did not involve physical movement, but was similar to the pretend intervention in that it did involve discussions of characters, stories, and emotions. Taken together, the block play condition therefore controls for the influence of the physical movement piece of the pretend intervention, while the story reading condition controls for the influence of the discussion of characters, stories, and emotions. Unique to the play condition is physical embodiment of characters, emotions, and mental states. Therefore, we could say that any change that happened for the children in the pretend intervention only would be due to that embodiment experience.

Intervention Implementation

The intervention was implemented in three weekly sessions over the course of 8 weeks (24 total sessions), which was long enough to allow for consistency in the intervention but fit within the time constraints given by the school. Children were randomly assigned to groups of four, with each group assigned to one of the three conditions (pretend, block playing, story reading). These conditions occurred at the same time in each classroom (e.g., one section of the classroom for those children in the pretend group, one for those in the block playing group, and one for those in the story reading group) using materials transported to the school by the group leader in a single rolling suitcase.

All three interventions began with a warm-up activity, followed by the two activities for that day (play, building structures, or reading books), then ended with a cool-down activity. Before beginning the intervention, group leaders (with no formal training in drama or early childhood education) practiced the activities for each intervention (pretend, blocks, reading). After a short training period, group leaders went on to implement all three conditions of the intervention with the children randomly assigned from the participating school. To look for patterns, areas of difficulty, and implementation fidelity, they wrote in a journal about their experiences for the day and had daily roundtable discussions after each day of running the intervention. This allowed research assistants to share experiences, fine-tune instructions, and brainstorm strategies for maintaining children’s attention and behavior. Group leaders also provided ratings of children’s enthusiasm and engagement for each day of the intervention, which were later aggregated to show an average level of each over the course of the intervention.

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Key Takeaways for Interventions in Early Childhood Classrooms

From the design and implementation of this intervention, a few takeaways summarize important concepts that can be extended to other areas of intervention for early childhood settings, as well as when thinking about the effects of pretend play on children’s development. These include:

1. Interventions should be fun and desirable to the program participants (in this case, preschool children).
2. Interventions should require minimal training for adult leaders and supplies should be easily transportable to lower the barrier to implementation.
3. Including a component of adult guidance will allow children to elevate their skill level in the area specifically targeted by the intervention.
4. Interventions should begin with “easy” activities (ones easily grasped by the children at their current skills levels) and progress to “hard” activities (ones that can be accomplished via practice and adult guidance).
5. The specific skills targeted by the intervention should be considered when developing the content of the activities in which children will engage.
6. Multiple control conditions should be used to isolate specific components of the targeted intervention that contributes to increases in the desired skills.
7. Leaders of an intervention should receive consistent guidance, feedback, and support to ensure that the activities are being implemented as designed.
8. Data should be collected both before and after an intervention to measure progress will controlling for beginning levels of whichever skill is the intended outcome of the intervention.