Critical Literature Review: Ho Ning Eunice

Ho Yi Ning Eunice (25)
Assessment 1 Essay: Critical Literature Review Play is a process-oriented activity that is active, fun and enjoyable. Children who engage in play are often intrinsically motivated and require no external reward (Johnson, Christie & Wardle, 2005). More than just promoting physical skills, problem-solving and social interactions, play plays a significant role in building up children’s “personal and cultural identity” (Lillemyr, 2009). In addition, children engage in a wide variety of play experiences which can range from the categories of play (e.g. functional play, symbolic play and games with rules) that is derived from Piaget’s Cognitive Theory of Intellectual Development (1962) to Parten’s Social Stages of Play (1932)

Hoffman and Russ (2012) first studied the behaviours of sixty-one girls in a five minute pretend play task with the use of two puppets and three blocks. Each session was videotaped and the children were assessed based on the frequency of positive and negative affective expressions displayed as well as their comfort level engaging in the task. Adding on, participants were assigned another task whereby they had to tell a story based on a picture book. The stories were then coded according to the “amount of affect expressed” and the use of emotion words (Hoffman & Russ, 2012, p. 178). Once again to ensure reliability, parents were given a questionnaire to score their child’s emotional regulation abilities. Based on their findings, Hoffman and Russ concluded that there was a positive correlation between pretend play and children’s social competence as those who were observed to be better at regulating their emotions were more at ease when engaged in the pretend play task. In addition, children who displayed more affective expressions and used a diverse range of emotion words during the storytelling task were given higher scores for emotion regulation by their parents. Lindsey and Colwell supports their findings as their study also concluded that high levels of involvement in pretend play resulted in higher emotion regulation and competence for girls (in

Over a period of six months, the children in the intervention group were exposed to four different pretend play themes such as doll play, transport, construction and home corner whereas children in the comparison group were not given any form of intervention. Baseline and follow-up data for all participants were collected before and after the interventions took place respectively. During pretend play interventions, children were assessed for their social competencies and behaviours (e.g. interactions, disruption and disconnection) using the ‘Penn Interactive Peer Play Scale (PIPPS)’. O’Connor and Stagnitti found children in the comparison group were more socially competent as compared to the children in the intervention group based on baseline data. However, they appeared to be “slightly more socially disconnected and disruptive” after the six-month intervention period while children in intervention group showed improvements in their social behaviours and were more cooperative towards their peers (O’Connor & Stagnitti, 2011, p.