PlayBuild is an after-school program located in New Orleans which repurposes vacant lots around central city to engage kids with the architectural history and design of public spaces with outdoor play with imagination playground and design challenges. Do these activities have unique cognitive learning opportunities that warrant investment, and if so what curriculum decisions contribute to positive learning outcomes and what kinds of methodology are feasible to measure such a cognitive development among children? A literature review on play and children’s cognitive development has been done to explore these three questions.
Before detailing particular research findings, below is a brief summary of this literature review. Research suggests that role play, joint action, and physically modeling objects, spaces, or systems can develop perspective-taking and systems literacy (Harris, Vygotsky, Schwartz et al., Sebanz et al., 2006). Research comparing invention-based curriculum with teaching-practice curriculums show evidence of perspective change (e.g., seeing deep structural relationships vs. surface feature covariation) and evidence that perception of deep structure correlates with increases in understanding and transfer.
Invention-based curriculums have the potential to engage participants in fantasy and role play as well as scale to forms of meaningful sociocultural participation in the community. Design and construction of diagrams and models of homes, cities, spaces, or city systems grounded in the community and history of New Orleans is worth an investment because it affords opportunities to develop perspective-taking, systems reasoning, metacognition, and mathematical and spatial thinking skills through meaningful participation in local community culture.
Lastly, after confirming the relationship between play and children’s cognitive development, several related methodologies are discussed in the last session to offer insight into the future PlayBuild research design.
Analytical Thinking and Joint Pretend Play
Joint pretend play is a very early context in which children learn how to put aside empirical thinking and accept the given premises through analytical thinking. Analytic thinking is a type of critical thinking, in which a person articulates, conceptualizes or solves problems by making decisions that are sensible given the available premises (Ref).
In joint pretend play, children accept the initiator’s instruction and enter an imaginative world which do not necessarily contain any empirical reality. Nevertheless, they adopt such a given worldview to imagine themselves in that same situation and act vis-a-vis that imaginary situation. This serves a stepstone for children’s school learning because school imparts knowledge in a formal analytical structure, and teachers teach knowledge that is beyond children’s empirical understanding (Harris, 2000). Gradually, children perceive teachers as taking up the didactic role while they themselves as adopting the student role.
Perspective Taking
Perspective-taking is defined as the process by which an individual views a situation from another’s point-of-view. Burns and Brainerd (1979) examined if constructive and dramatic plays bring improvements on perspective taking for preschool children. 51 children with the average age of 4 years and 10 months who were attending day care center were divided into three groups: the constructive play experimental group, the dramatic play experimental group, and the control group respectively. The constructive group had 10 play sessions, which were to build certain objects with materials provided in small groups. The first session’s project was suggested by the experimenter, but the consecutive sessions’ projects were decided by the children. For the dramatic play group, the children were to choose a character after the experimenter explained the theme of the play of each session. The control group did not have any activities other than pretest and posttest which were administered at the same time as the experimental groups. Pretest consisted of three different types of perspective tasks: one perceptual task, two cognitive tasks, and two affective tasks. For perceptual task, the children were told to turn a tray with some characters on it to the way how the experimenter is seeing it. For cognitive task, some objects such as flower, tie, socks, doll, and purse were spreaded on a table and the children were asked to pick an appropriate birthday present for mom, dad, teacher, and friend. During the affective task, 3 pairs of pictures were shown to the children and an experimenter read them a short story. After the experimenter read the story, the children were told decide whether the characters in stories felt happy, sad, mad, or afraid. [Maybe add a couple of lines with examples of the test items.
Originally published 15.10.2019