Developmental Play Assessment for Practitioners (DPA-P) Guidebook and Training Website

Project Play

Karin Lifter, Emanuel J. Mason, Amanda M. Cannarella, Ashley D. Cameron

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000516012
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Enseignement primaire

Developmental Play Assessment for Practitioners (DPA-P) Guidebook and Training Website: Project Play offers a comprehensive assessment of naturally occurring play activities for evaluating young children's developmental progress accurately, so that useful interventions can take place as early as possible. It can be used by practitioners in a wide range of educational and therapeutic settings and is designed to support developmental progress through planning interventions in play, and using what we know about a child's progress in play to plan play-based interventions in cognition, language, motor, social-emotional, and self-help skills.

The guidebook and training website provide a comprehensive introduction to how to successfully use the assessment with infants, toddlers, and young children with disabilities or at risk for disabilities. The comprehensive guidebook offers an overview of the DPA-P and Project Play, defines play, discusses the background literature on play, and explains why this assessment is needed. Clear guidance helps practitioners and family members understand play, how to evaluate play, and how to use play for different purposes.

The guidebook offers:

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• an introduction to the comprehensive training website and how to use it

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• understanding of the categories of play assessed and their definitions

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• guidance on how to administer the assessment and prepare a summary evaluation of a child's performance

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• clear instructions for the coding sheets and scoring

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• guidelines for constructing sets of toys

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• guidance on taking the results of the DPA-P evaluation of a child's progress in play to develop a plan of activities for intervention

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• explanation of how you evaluate activities at the absence, basic, emergence, and mastery levels for developing a plan

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• suggestions for assembling sets of toys for intervention, based on toys available in children's homes and early childhood settings

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• procedures for facilitating or teaching play activities to children who are developing more slowly than their peers
  

• technical aspects of the assessment
  
  

To make the DPA-P as flexible as possible for all practitioners, it also offers guidance on adaptations for administering the test, in the coding sheets, with toys to enhance cultural appropriateness for gathering the observations, and for supporting interventions in play.

The Developmental Play Assessment for Practitioners (DPA-P) can be used in natural settings and takes 30 minutes to complete. It is a valuable tool for all those who serve, or are training to serve, young children in early childhood settings, schools, service agencies, colleges, and universities. It will be of great benefit for early intervention personnel, speech-language pathologists, physical therapists, occupational therapists, and psychologists.

Please visit https://www.routledge.com/Developmental-Play-Assessment-for-Practitioners-DPA-P-Coding-Sheets/Lifter-Mason-Cannarella-Cameron/p/book/9781032190310 to purchase sets of the Developmental Play Assessment for Practitioners (DPA-P) color-coded coding sheets.

1

Introduction to the DPA-P

DOI: 10.4324/9781003093152-1

Overview

This introductory chapter begins with some broad strokes about what play is. We then provide the definition of play that we used for our research studies, which formed the basis of the Developmental Play Assessment for Practitioners (DPA-P). The purpose of the DPA-P and the rationale for it follow. Thereafter, we summarize the developmental model that underlies the DPA-P, which includes theoretical perspectives and the background empirical research. The chapter concludes with the organization of this guidebook. Why play is important in development is taken up in greater detail in Chapter 2.

What Is Play?

Play is the natural activity of childhood. From the first moment infants are able to grasp objects, whether they be toys, pots and pans, or sticks and stones, infants will intently explore them. Children will take advantage of every opportunity to play with these things, taking hold of the objects and doing things with them in a most concentrated manner. The earliest activities may look like banging, throwing, mouthing, or grabbing the object, but they evolve into more systematic relationships between objects, like moving things in and out of containers to eventually pretending they are going to the beach with figures packing up the car with things. What children are actually doing in play is much more complex than simply playing. They are learning about their worlds, developing their understandings and knowledge about how people interact with objects in various events.

Moreover, children across the world play with things (Roopnarine, 2011). Researchers have studied the play activities of children from many different cultures (e.g, Cote & Bornstein, 2009). Piaget (1962) claimed that play is universal in childhood. Others claim that while all children play, what they do in play reflects the beliefs and practices of their cultures (Göncü & Gaskins, 2011), and cultural values are transmitted through the use of objects as “tools” (Bjorklund & Gardiner, 2011).

Play is obvious in many ways, and we all think we know what play is. Yet, if you asked a group of caregivers and practitioners how they would define play, you would obtain many different definitions. These definitions range from play on the playground with various games, to locomotor play (Pellegrini, 2011), to pretend play (Leslie, 1987; Lillard, 1993), to dramatic play (Smilansky, 1968), and to fantasy play (Rubin, 1980) as children take on roles in play with their peers. We also think of play in terms of children working with blocks by stacking them and constructing buildings, in addition to children playing with doll houses and using pop-up toys in cause-effect scenarios. Parten (1932) described play in terms of children’s coordination in social engagement, with descriptors such as solitary play, parallel play, and cooperative play.

Hughes (2012, p. 98) provided a taxonomy of play, which includes 16 play types: communication play, creative play, deep play, dramatic play, exploratory play, fantasy play, imaginative play, locomotor play, mastery play, object play, recapitulative play, role play, rough and tumble play, social play, socio-dramatic play, and symbolic play.

Burghardt (2011) provided a review of definitions, proposing five necessary criteria for recognizing play in organisms:

the performance of the behavior is not fully functional in the form or context in which it is expressed … (2) the behavior is spontaneous, voluntary, intentional, pleasurable, rewarding, reinforcing, or autotelic (“done for its own sake”); (3) it differs from strictly functional expressions of behavior structurally or functionally in at least one respect: incomplete (generally though inhibited or dropped final elements), exaggerated, awkward, precocious, or involves behavior patterns with modified forms, sequencing or targeting; (4) the behavior is performed repeatedly in a similar, but not rigidly stereotyped form; and (5) the behavior is initiated when an animal is adequately fed, clothed, healthy and not under stress.

(p. 13–16)

This large range of descriptions presented above makes it very difficult to define what play is consistently, especially for purposes of assessment and intervention. Many of these terms overlap. Accordingly, researchers need to be very specific in defining play for study.

Our Definition of Play

To develop the DPA-P, we took a particular focus. We defined play as spontaneous, naturally occurring activities with objects (i.e., toys) that engage attention and interest. This kind of play is called object play, and it is embedded in many descriptions of play, such as pretend play and symbolic play. Bjorklund and Gardiner (2011) described object play in terms of “how objects can be used as tools to achieve goals and solve problems” (p. 153).

We distinguished object play from play on the playground and other sorts of play. We also distinguished it from play with peers, which involves a social component, such as parallel play. We chose to focus specifically on object play because it provides a window into what children know and are learning. We regard object play more expansively than “to achieve goals and solve problems,” proposed by Bjorklund and Gardiner (2011). We claim that in their play with toys, children develop knowledge about objects, people, and events. For example, they learn that objects are separate things that can be entered into relations with other objects (e.g., moving beads in and out of containers). They also learn that with various combinations of objects they can represent activities of their cultures (e.g., stirring a spoon in a cup and then feeding a baby doll). Children learn that they can pretend one thing is another (e.g., pretending a stick is a tool that they can use to fix a car). And they learn that people are animate beings that can do things with toys (e.g., move an action figure to load goods into a truck).

We capture these different levels of knowledge with the generation of categories of activities. The categories represent a qualitative character that captures their essential properties. Using one of the examples above, when we see children moving objects in and out of containers, the children are using their senses to learn about the general properties of objects – that they are things that can be moved in relation to other things. Similarly, the activities of stirring a spoon in a cup and then feeding a baby doll not only include the knowledge that objects are things that can be moved in relation to other objects, but that certain objects have specific properties that can be entered into relationships to other objects and events from their everyday experiences. These properties are remembered and recalled in the context of play. These two examples of activities are very different from one another. Their distinctions are captured with the qualitative differences among the categories of play activities that we have identified for the DPA-P.

These different aspects of knowledge about their worlds that children express in play, along with underlying developments in conceptual understandings, contribute to their developments in cognition, language, social engagement, and literacy. This knowledge also contributes to the content of their interactions with peers and to what they talk about in these interactions. Accordingly, we determined that a means to evaluate developments in object play would be a worthy endeavor, given the importance of play for young children.

Purpose of the DPA-P

We developed the DPA-P to help practitioners and family members to understand (a) play; (b) how to use play to evaluate development; and (c) how to use play for different purposes. Understanding play and charting its developmental course are central components to the DPA-P. Consequently, we observed and analyzed the play activities of 289 children who are developing typically, and 203 children who are developing with delays, over the age span of 8 months to 60 months. We present a summary of that work in Chapter 2, which includes the basis for the 14 qualitatively different categories of play that provide the organization of the DPA-P.

Using play to evaluate children’s development is very important for children who are developing typically, but most especially for children who are developing more slowly than their peers, given the difficulties they experience. In addition, young children in general, and children with delays and disabilities in particular, have difficulty answering questions in elicited formats, as is required in many assessment formats. They also have difficulty expressing themselves with words. An evaluation of naturally occurring play activities provides an important alternative to evaluations based on elicited formats.

We designed the DPA-P for different uses. The central premise of the DPA-P is that instructional goals for infants, toddlers, and young children with disabilities or at risk for disabilities should include attention to developments in play as well as to developments in the other domains (i.e., cognition, language, social-emotional, motor, and self-help skills). Because developments in play contribute to outcomes in cognitive, language, and social development, we believe that increased and systematic attention to a child’s progress in play is warranted. We designed the DPA-P as a tool to generate a profile of a child’s skills in play for the purposes of guiding instructional planning. Instructional planning can focus on the child’s progress in play or it can focus on the use of play to support goals in other domains. An evaluation with the DPA-P results in the identification, primarily, of goals in play to help a child progress in play, and, secondarily, of play activities to support goals in other domains. Both approaches are described in Chapter 10.

Rationale for the DPA-P

The rationale for the DPA-P centers on (a) the need for a systematic evaluation of play, (b) the considerable research on children’s play, and (c) the difficulties in play observed in children who are developing with delays. It is difficult to evaluate a child’s progress in play without a systematic means to do so. Practitioners and family members might be confused by the amount of play activities a child engages in, without understanding the quality and distribution of the child’s activities. For example, a child might stay very busy playing with toys, appearing to be a competent player, but the overall quality of the activities is relatively simple for that child at that particular age. The DPA-P provides a means of evaluating the quality and distribution of a child’s play activities to be able to support the child’s progress in play, given all we know about developments in play.

There is considerable research on children’s play. The research studies on object play underscore the importance of play in children’s lives (Belsky & Most, 1981; Fenson, Kagan, Kearsley, & Zelazo, 1976; Fenson & Ramsay, 1980, 1981; Garvey, 1977; Lifter & Bloom, 1989; Lowe, 1975; McCune, 1995; Nicolich, 1977; Rubin, 1980; Smilansky, 1968; Watson & Fischer, 1977; Zelazo & Kearsley, 1980). Researchers identified qualitatively different categories of children’s play and demonstrated that changes in these categories, and the developments of new categories, are ordered in development and reflect underlying changes in the development of knowledge. These studies demonstrated that play develops. They also set the stage for our own empirical work on the play of 492 children between the ages of 8 and 60 months. We had determined that this entire age span had not been covered in one study. We wanted to evaluate how categories of play build upon one another and co-vary over time.

Researchers also extended the study of play to children who were developing with disabilities. They observed that young children with delays often have delays in their play too. These children’s play is characterized as limited in frequency, variety, and symbolic quality (e.g., Beeghly, Weiss-Perry, & Cicchetti, 1990; Fewell & Kaminski, 1988; Hill & McCune-Nicolich, 1981; Libby, Powell, Messer, & Jordan, 1998; Malone, Stoneman, & Langone, 1994; Odom, 1981; Quinn & Rubin, 1984; Rogers, 1988; Sigman & Mundy, 1987; Stagnitti, Unsworth, & Rodger, 2000; Ungerer & Sigman, 1981; Williams, Reddy, & Costall, 2001; Wing, Gould, Yeates, & Brierly, 1977; and Wong & Kasari, 2012). The children might not know how to play, which supports the need for direct instruction in play. Such delays led to a large number of studies focused on interventions in play (e.g., Barton, 2015; Barton & Wolery, 2010; Kasari, Freeman, & Paparella, 2006; Kasari, Gulsrud, Paparella, Hellemann, & Berry 2015; Lifter, Sulzer-Azaroff, Anderson, & Cowdery, 1993; Lifter, Ellis, Cannon, & Anderson, 2005; and Stahmer, 1995).

Such delays also influence the use of play to support goals in other domains of activity (e.g., language, social goals, motor activities). Because play is a natural activity, practitioners often use the natural activities of play to support goals in these other domains. Such uses of play assume the child has the knowledge that underlies the play activities that are being brought to bear to serve the other goals. If a child does not have that knowledge, however, the play activities being used for the implementation activities may compromise the success of the other goals. The rationale for the DPA-P includes the identification of play activities to support goals in other domains.

Background of the DPA-P

The Developmental Play Assessment (Professional Version: DPA-P) was developed as part of “Project Play,” which is the research project that formed its foundation. Project Play was supported through a grant from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), US Department of Education (Grant number R324A100100) to Northeastern University. We provide a summary of this research in Chapter 2. We present the background of the DPA-P here. It is based on a developmental model that is guided by a theoretical perspective and grounded in empirical research.

Theoretical Perspective

There is considerable theory that underscores the importance of play in development. Piaget (1962) provided certain fundamental concepts. He defined play as the “happy display of known actions” (p. 93). He conceptualized it in terms of activities of assimilation, wherein children adapt play activities to the understandings they have developed about objects. He described the developments of play in terms of a sequence of stages: sensorimotor play, symbolic play, and games with rules. Piaget proposed these stages in terms of cognitive universals. Descriptive terms that persist from his work are “sensorimotor (manipulative) play” and “symbolic play” for the period of late infancy through the preschool ages.

Montessori (1967) provided an alternative perspective in claiming that play is “the child’s work” (p. 180). Here we see the learning function of play – that the child must be given the time and space to learn about their worlds. Vygotsky (in Rubin et al., 1983) described play as an adaptive mechanism promoting cognitive growth (p. 709). Vygotsky (1967) ascribed greater attention to the influence of environments, culture, and economic factors on development. He claimed that development is sociocultural and not individual.

Admittedly, these theories are “European-heritage” theories (Roopnarine, 2011). They are the dominant theories at this point. As noted by Roopnarine (2011), new and more expansive theories that account for cultural beliefs and values, in addition to processes of acculturation, are needed to fully understand play and its relation to outcom...