A hop, skip and a jump towards evaluating social interaction and learning through play at a child and adolescent inpatient treatment program.

BACKGROUND: The number of inpatient mental health facilities for children and adolescents in the United States is growing rapidly. While undergoing inpatient treatment, children and adolescents can benefit from innovative play opportunities designed to foster social interaction and learning. METHODS: The Playful Learning Landscapes (PLL) initiative is a group of projects designed to transform everyday spaces into opportunities for playful learning. As a part of this initiative, two designs-Lifesize Ruler and Jumping Feet-were installed in an inpatient mental health facility for children and adolescents in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. RESULTS: Results of pre-installation and post-installation naturalistic observations suggested that social interactions, the use of STEM-related language and 21st century skills, including confidence, increased after interacting with the installations. CONCLUSIONS: While previous research on PLL projects has demonstrated the efficacy of transforming public spaces into places for playful learning, this research provides support that, even in private, targeted settings, using a trauma-informed approach, children and adolescents, can reap the benefits of playful learning.

Reinventing the public square and early educational settings through culturally informed, community co-design: Playful Learning Landscapes.

What if the environment could be transformed in culturally-responsive and inclusive ways to foster high-quality interactions and spark conversations that drive learning? In this article, we describe a new initiative accomplishing this, called Playful Learning Landscapes (PLL). PLL is an evidence-based initiative that blends findings from the science of learning with community-based participatory research to transform physical public spaces and educational settings into playful learning hubs. Here, we describe our model for conducting this research, which is mindful of three key components: community input, how children learn best, and what children need to learn to be successful in the 21st century economy. We describe how this model was implemented in two PLL case studies: one in a predominantly Latine community and the second in early childhood education classrooms. Furthermore, we describe how research employing our model can be rigorously and reliably evaluated using observational and methodological tools that respond to diverse cultural settings and learning outcomes. For example, our work evaluates how PLL impacts adult-child interaction quality and language use, attitudes about play and learning, and community civic engagement. Taken together, this article highlights new ways to involve community voices in developmental and educational research and provides a model of how science can be translated into practice and evaluated in culturally responsive ways. This synthesis of our process and evaluation can be used by researchers, policymakers, and educators to reimagine early educational experiences with an eye toward the built environment that children inhabit in everyday life, creating opportunities that foster lifelong learning.

Mothers talk about infants' actions: How verbs correspond to infants' real-time behavior.

Infants learn nouns during object-naming events-moments when caregivers name the object of infants' play (e.g., ball as infant holds a ball). Do caregivers also label the actions of infants' play (e.g., roll as infant rolls a ball)? We investigated connections between mothers' verb inputs and infants' actions. We video-recorded 32 infant-mother dyads for 2 hr at home (13 month olds, n = 16; 18 month olds, n = 16; girls, n = 16; White, n = 23; Asian, n = 2; Black, n = 1; other, n = 1; multiple races, n = 5; Hispanic/Latinx, n = 2). Dyads were predominantly from middle-class to upper middle-class households. We identified each manual verb (e.g., press, shake) and whole-body verb (e.g., kick, go) that mothers directed to infants. We coded whether infants displayed manual and/or whole-body actions during a 6-s window surrounding the verb (i.e., 3 s prior and 3 s after the named verb). Mothers' verbs and infant actions were largely congruent: Whole-body verbs co-occurred with whole-body actions, and manual verbs co-occurred with manual actions. Moreover, half of mothers' verbs corresponded precisely to infants' concurrent action (e.g., infant pressed button as mother said, "Press the button"). In most instances, mothers commented on rather than instigated infants' actions. Findings suggest that verb learning is embodied, such that infants' motor actions offer powerful cues to verb meanings. Furthermore, our approach highlights the value of cross-domain research integrating infants' developing motor and language skills to understand word learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Infant exuberant object play at home: Immense amounts of time-distributed, variable practice.

Object play yields enormous benefits for infant development. However, little is known about natural play at home where most object interactions occur. We conducted frame-by-frame video analyses of spontaneous activity in two 2-h home visits with 13-month-old crawling infants and 13-, 18-, and 23-month-old walking infants (N = 40; 21 boys; 75% White). Regardless of age, for every infant and time scale, across 10,015 object bouts, object interactions were short (median = 9.8 s) and varied (transitions among dozens of toys and non-toys) but consumed most of infants' time. We suggest that infant exuberant object play-immense amounts of brief, time-distributed, variable interactions with objects-may be conducive to learning object properties and functions, motor skill acquisition, and growth in cognitive, social, and language domains.

Play in Mexican-American mothers and toddlers is frequent, multimodal, and rich in symbolic content.

Play offers rich opportunities for toddlers to develop motor, social, cognitive, and language skills, particularly during interactions with adult caregivers who may scaffold toddlers to higher levels of play than toddlers achieve on their own. However, research on play has narrowly focused on children from White, middle-income backgrounds, leaving a dearth of knowledge about dyadic play in diverse cultural communities. We videorecorded 222 Mexican-American mothers playing with their 2-year-old toddlers with a standard set of toys. Play behaviors were coded as nonsymbolic or symbolic (play type) and as expressed through manual, verbal, or multiple channels (play modality). Play between toddlers and mothers was frequent, high in symbolic content, and toddler play closely corresponded with mother play in type and modality: Toddlers' nonsymbolic play related to mothers' nonsymbolic play; toddlers' symbolic play related to mothers' symbolic play; toddlers' manual play related to mothers' manual play; and toddlers' multimodal play related to mothers' multimodal play. Play in Mexican-American mothers and toddlers is frequent, multimodal, and symbolically rich, offering new directions for future research and practice.

Do, say, learn: the functions of mothers' speech to infants.

We examined the functions of mothers' speech to infants during two tasks - book-sharing and bead-stringing - in low-income, ethnically diverse families. Mexican, Dominican, and African American mothers and their infants were video-recorded sharing wordless books and toy beads in the home when infants were aged 1;2 and 2;0. Mothers' utterances were classified into seven categories (labels/descriptions, emotion/state language, attention directives, action directives, prohibitions, questions, and vocal elicitations) which were grouped into three broad language functions: referential language, regulatory language, and vocalization prompts. Mothers' ethnicity, years of education, years living in the United States, and infant sex and age related to mothers' language functions. Dominican and Mexican mothers were more likely to use regulatory language than were African American mothers, and African American mothers were more likely to use vocalization prompts than were Latina mothers. Vocalization prompts and referential language increased with mothers' education and Latina mothers' years living in the United States. Finally, mothers of boys used more regulatory language than did mothers of girls. Socio-cultural and developmental contexts shape the pragmatics of mothers' language to infants.