Education and Children's development

Question 1

What is play?

Answer 1

• play behaviours are creative and behaviourally flexible encounters with the world
• Components of play (adapted from Burghardt 1984, 2005):
  
  • Voluntary
  • Non-functional (means over ends)
  • Nature of behaviours may not resemble those ina functional context
  • Positive effect

Question 2

Funtioning of Play

Answer 2

• Long term:
  
  • Classic view of play is that it is practice for adulthood
  • Maste behaviourthat are important functionally
• Immediate:
  
  • May help children learn new skills
    
    • Imaginary play linked to perspective taking
  • Allows practice in “novel” situations
    
    • Generate new responses in novel environments

Question 3

Domains of Play

Answer 3

1. Locomotor
2. Object Play
3. Social Play
4. Pretend Play

Question 4

Locomotor

Answer 4

• Defining features:
  
  • ​Physically active
  • not functional
• Types:
  
  • Rythmical stereotypies
    
    • Seen in infancy
    • Infats spend about 5% of their time engaged in such behaviours
    • no gender differences
  • Exercise play
    
    • Swiming, jumping, swinging, splashing, etc.
    • Increases through preschool years
    • Peaks at around 4 to 5 years old and then declines
    • Boys engage in more exercise play than girls (this could be due to encouragement)

Question 5

Functions of Locomtor

Answer 5

• Rythmic stereotypies linked to motor development (Thelen 1979)
• Locomotor is linked with physical strength and endurance
• Children appear to need it
  
  • researchers have done studies with preschoolers and elementary school children in which they vary the amoutn of time children spend in their seats doing school work
  • The longer they are on their seats, the more vigorously they play

Question 6

Object Play

Answer 6

Preschoolers (3 to 5 years old) spend a lot of time engaged in object play:

• In a study, researchers observed preschoolers during school year:
  
  • 26% of all observed behaviour was pretend play with objects
  • Boys did this more than girls
  • 10% of all observed behaviour was construction
    
    • Girls engaged more than boys
  • These behaviours may peak in preeschool or early elementaty school.

Question 7

Functions of Object Play

Answer 7

• was hypothesised that playing with objects increases problem-solving skills
  
  • data is not consistent with this
• Example:
  
  • Researchers looked at association between amout of time preschoolers spent playing with objects during the year and their performance on a lure-retrieval task, in which children are presentaed with an out-of-reach object and tolls they could use to reach it
  • Results: no association!

Question 8

Social Play

Answer 8

Defining characteristic: interaction between two people

• children adult or two children

Question 9

Adult-Child Social Play

Answer 9

• Adults will self-handicap
• Give child the chance to be in different roles

Question 10

Peer Social Play

Answer 10

• rough-and-tumble play
  
  • physically vigorous behaviours
  • exagerated movement
  • role-taking and self-handicaping
  • 50 50 rule
• Observational studies suggest that rough-and-stumble play accounts for
  
  • 4% of behaviours in preschool
  • 10% of behaviours in elementary school
  • 4% of behaviours in adolescence
• Boys do it 2 to 3 more often than girls

Question 11

Functions of Social Play in childhood

Answer 11

• Opportunity to practice fighting skills
  
  • no evidence to support this
• Learning to decode social skills
  
  • Some evidence that rough-and-tumble is linked to the ability to decode emotional signals
• Helping boys to form social groups
  
  • occurs more frequently among groups of boys who egage in high levels of activity and rough behaviour
• Way to learn about behaviours of others and demonstrate your own strength

Question 12

Functions during adolescence

Answer 12

• linked to aggressive behaviour
• Dominant adolescents initiate it with less dominant pears
• May be a way of using agression to control resources

Question 13

Pretend Play

Answer 13

• Begins in parent-child interactions (peek-a-boo!)
• Parents expand on children’s pretend themes
• Around 1.5 years old and 2 years old children begin to engaging in pretend play with peers
• Peaks at arounf 5 years old
• There is also solitary pretend play

Question 14

Functions of Pretend Play

Answer 14

• Early litteracy
  
  • aspects of children pretend play prospectively predicts early language and writting skills (after accounting for verbal IQ)
• TOM:
  
  • pretend play has also be linked to be better understanding of others’ beliefs, thoughts and intentions

Question 15

Imaginary friends (TODO) W7E1

Question 16

TODO W7E2