Measuring learning through play across five countries: Evidence from the Play Accelerator evaluation

• In Event: Measuring Learning through Play in low- and middle-income countries: Innovations across contexts

Proposal

While evidence of the impact of learning through play (LtP) on student outcomes in high-income countries is vast (Parker & Thomsen, 2019), there is little research linking LtP to learning outcomes in low-and middle-income contexts in primary schools. Evidence that does exists in low-income contexts follows the positive outcomes of LtP from birth through the preschool years (Chaudhary & Kaul, 2018; Zosh et al., 2017). Despite the mounting evidence of the importance of play on learning and development in the early years, playful pedagogies have not permeated into primary schools. Accordingly, the LEGO Foundation’s Play Accelerator program is specifically designed to expand playful pedagogies into primary schools in five low and middle-income countries (LMICs).

RTI International has received funding from The LEGO Foundation to serve as external evaluator for these five programs, with a focus on researching the scaling of playful pedagogies through in-service primary school teacher professional development in Bangladesh (BRAC, Vietnam (VVOB), Kenya (Aga Khan Foundation), Rwanda (UNICEF) and Ghana (Right to Play).
In our presentation, we will provide an in-depth overview of the process for designing, developing, piloting, validating, and administering newly created tools for measuring learning through play as part of the baseline evaluation for Play Accelerator. Specifically, we have developed tools to measure student outcomes (traditional learning outcomes as well as holistic measures), student attitudes and attendance, teachers’ pedagogical methods, attitudes and knowledge, as well as attitudes on playful pedagogy from caregivers and local education officials. All tools were designed based on an extensive review of existing tools and measures (focused on appropriateness for use in low- and middle-income countries, ease of use, psychometric properties on reliability and validity, and the ability to be adapted to new contexts.

The focus of the presentation will be on the tools that provide more nuanced measures of play, as well as those expected to be directed related to increased playfulness in the classroom (e.g. the social and emotional learning of children, the classroom observation of teacher and student playful practices, and an attitude scale designed to measure perceptions of the value of learning through play across stakeholders).

A significant contribution of this work is the focus on contextualization, stemming from our pilot work across contexts. For example, in some cultures, adults are rarely directly engaged in play. Adult-child relationships may be more hierarchical and not supportive of child questioning or high levels of interaction. Thus, the barriers that teachers face in implementing LtP pedagogies are not related only to the skills they have, but also stem from culturally conditioned ways of interacting with students. Cultural differences are also relevant to the measurement of play and its outcomes, as playful learning takes on different forms in different contexts.

These new tools and baseline results for scalability of learning through play interventions, will be essential for informing future programming, as well as adding to the literature on reliably and validly measuring learning through play in low and lower-middle income countries.

Authors

• Jonathan Stern, RTI International

• Benjamin Piper, RTI International

• Matthew Jukes, RTI International