Abstract
Play is foundational to childhood, learning, and happiness. This culturally responsive intervention empowers parents to facilitate their child’s occupation of hands-on constructive play, a foundation for engagement and lifelong learning.
Primary Author and Speaker: Michelle Boulanger Thompson
Play is foundational to childhood, learning, and happiness. It is through play that children learn about themselves, the world, and other people, as well as acquire pre-academic and social-emotional school readiness skills. Constructive play is a creative process-oriented activity that promotes engaged learning through building and designing with materials. It provides young children opportunities to adapt to their environment and develop emotional readiness and play skills foundational for learning. This intervention study explores the impact of a parent-implemented culturally-responsive intervention on children’s active engagement in constructive play. The research methodology utilized is a single-subject multiple-baseline across participants design with four parent/child dyads. Data was collected across baseline, intervention, and maintenance phases. This design controlled for threats to external validity. Children selected to participate were at-risk for developmental delay due to risk factors of poverty and/or teacher and parent concerns about play with toys. Parent-provided play videos were coded for 20-second intervals over 5 minutes using a partial-interval recording procedure and inter-observer agreement was established at 87%-100% across all phases. Visual and data analysis supports a functional relation between the parent-implemented temporal, physical, and social-emotional environmental intervention, and children’s engagement in constructive play. Participants demonstrated an improvement in level median, absolute change, and relative change between baseline and intervention phases, validating the intervention. Social validity was strong as parents described this intervention as meaningful to the lives of their children and their families. These outcomes provide evidence supporting the importance of working with parents in their home environment to support their children’s engaged constructive play, important occupations of childhood and parenting.
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