Chapter 16: Researching Play in Early Childhood

In past decades early childhood education (ECE) arguably has had more research results on play to consume, and to try to make sense of, than our field has had with findings relating to any other topic (Cheng & Johnson, 2009; Johnson, Sevimli-Celik, & Al-Mansour, 2013). Although throughout the history of ECE play has always maintained a place of prominence, the systematic empirical study of it in the United States can be traced back to the Child Study Movement from 1889 to 1911 with the collaboration between Lucy Wheelock and G. Stanley Hall, and into the early twentieth century with the founding of The Play School in 1914 by Carolyn Pratt and the establishment of The Bureau of Educational Experiments in 1916 by Lucy Sprague Mitchell (Wolfe, 2002). Parten’s (1932) research on social dynamics in the nursery school is widely viewed as landmark work ushering in the use of observational methods and the coding of levels of social participation in children’s play (i.e., unoccupied, onlooker, solitary, parallel, associative, and cooperative). Significant extension of this classical research on play in ECE occurred in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s under the influence of Piagetian theory and the resultant attention given to the cognitive development of young children and play behaviors (Rubin, Fein, & Vandenberg, 1983). For example, Smilansky (1968) coined ‘socio-dramatic play’ signaling the need to study together simultaneously both the cognitive form (e.g., symbolic, constructive, functional, games-with-rule, etc.) as well as the social level of children’s play. An enormous growth of research on play in ECE has occurred over the latter part of the twentieth century into the present century.