Poster #164 - Enhancing executive function through imaginary play: A promising new practice principle

• In Event: 1-115 - Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Section - Prevention and Interventions

Integrative Statement

Research has demonstrated that improving children’s Executive Function (EF) skills in the year prior to school can produce lasting benefits across the school years. The early childhood years have been identified as highly significant for the development of important EF skills, such as inhibition, cognitive flexibility (shifting) and working memory. These cognitive control processes have been found to be related to children’s academic and social success across the school years. Whilst EF interventions have been found to enhance children’s EF skills, many focused interventions are not sustainable because teachers tend to discontinue EF programs once the research ceases. This poster presents data from a study conducted with preschool teachers trialling an intervention in which EF activities are embedded in teachers’ daily practices and in which imaginary play is used to build meaningful problem situations that children solve using EF.
The participants were 227 preschool children (53% male, M age = 55.5 months, SD = 4.2) in 10 preschool groups in 6 preschool centres from Brisbane, Australia. The intervention consisted of educators and children creating and developing an imaginary situation (Playworld) over an extended period (e.g., 1 school term). A Playworld follows a narrative format of a rich story or a fairytale where a problem is embedded in the role-play and where children work together with educators to solve the problem. Playworlds are suitable narrative devices for enhancing EF because they create the conditions for motivating children to engage in EF tasks for a real purpose. That is, when children try to solve the problems embedded in the playworld, they meet challenges that they have to solve using inhibition, planning and shifting tasks to reach successful solutions. EF was assessed pre and post the intervention. Inhibition was assessed using the Animal Stroop, shifting by the Animal Shifting task and planning by the Truck Loading task.
A repeated measures ANOVA was conducted to explore change over time in children’s executive function scores between the pre-test and the post-test. There was a significant main effect for time, Wilk’s lambda = .440, F (3, 180) = 76.501, p < .001. Univariate tests showed significant differences between Time 1 and Time 2 for Inhibition, F (1, 182) = 108.104, p <.001, Shifting, F (1, 182) = 81.582, p <.001, and Planning, F (1,182) = 88.849, p <.001. Findings demonstrate how EF can be integrated into early childhood teachers’ existing programs. Such an understanding will enable a sustained and rich learning environment for EF development to be achieved in early childhood settings. The significant differences on all measures of EF between Time 1 and Time 2 indicate substantial growth in EF skills over the course of the ten week term period. While these findings suggest that the playworlds intervention potentially had an effect, the pre- post design does not enable any strong conclusions to be drawn. It is possible that the preschool programs by themselves were responsible for enhancing children’s EF development. However, the use of playworlds did actively promote the intentional teaching of EF.

Authors

• Sue Walker, Queensland University of Technology
  Presenting Author

• Marilyn Fleer, Monash University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Nikolai Veresov, Monash University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Iris Duhn, Monash University
  Non-Presenting Author