The Essence of Play

Evaluation of childrens' play

“…They offer an alternative to the traditional standardized assessment with contrived tasks that could give rise to unnecessary emotional pressure or feeling of failure or incompetence in children. Since play skills are often the same as those used in other domains, assessing them may be easier through non-threatening play activities (Howard & McInnes, 2013).…”

“…Play materials are an important contextual factor in the play assessment that can influence a child's natural play behaviours . According to Howard and McInnes (2013), the professionals have an important role in creating playful environments, presenting appropriate activities and facilitating positive and fruitful interactions. Thus, the observer should ensure that toys with the potential to elicit more complex forms of play are accessible to the child.…”

“…Recording techniques reduce biases in the transcription process but are costly in time and personnel. Howard and McInnes (2013) present and describe different observation techniques usually used by psychologists and anthropologists. The narrative techniques and diaries involve recording observations in some medium such as a diary or video and audio recording.…”

“…The practitioner can record the child's movements, what areas he prefers, how he spends time in the different play activities. The observation schedules can be a time sampling, event sampling and behavioural checklist and focus the observation on one of those particular aspects, summarizing data in brief and clear information (Howard & McInnes, 2013).…”

“…According to Howard & McInnes (2013), psychologists use mainly play-based assessments to highlight certain skills and aspects that are necessary for the child's development such as, for example, happiness, physical activity and socialization with other children or problem solving. Such assessments are generally used for two purposes: to track developmental progress and to make important decisions about the intervention (Brassard & Bohem, 2008, in Howard & McInnes, 2013. They usually use different observational tools that can be structured, unstructured or a mixture of both, based on documentation or observation schedules developed by the practitioner.…”