Project Play

Developmental Play Assessment for Practitioners (DPA-P)

Project Play began as a research program focused on developments in play, given the importance of play activities for young children. In addition to studying developments in play in young children who are developing typically or with delays, a major goal of our team has been the creation of the Developmental Play Assessment (DPA-P) for determining a child’s progress in play.

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Features

What we offer here is a play assessment system. It includes:

  1. The Developmental Play Assessment for Practitioners (DPA-P), which is a guidebook that presents our studies on young children’s play and all aspects of how we developed the assessment and how to use it.
  2. A packet of scoring sheets for scoring observations of children’s play, adaptable for use with various toys.
  3. An online training program – Project Play Course – for learning how to use the DPA-P. Each of these three components are to be used in conjunction with one another. To be able to administer the DPA-P accurately and make thoughtful judgments essential to a child’s progress in play, the expectation is that you will go through the training program in the order in which it has been designed, and with the guidebook and scoring sheets in hand.

As you will see in the tabs above, you may contact us using the Contact tab. With the Purchase tab, you can purchase the DPA-P Guidebook, and the booklet of coding sheets for using the DPA-P. The guidebook presents all aspects of the DPA-P, and it includes access to the online training program.

The Developmental Play Assessment for Practitioners (DPA-P)

Play is an important and natural activity that young children use to learn about their worlds. Child psychology experts agree that play is very important for young children. Play contributes to children’s development of knowledge and their ability to think, which in turn impacts their capabilities in language, social skills, and academic skills. 

The National Association for the Education of Young Children (naeyc), in their Principles of Child Development and Learning, emphasize “Play promotes joyful learning that fosters self-regulation, language, cognitive and social competencies as well as content knowledge across disciplines. Play is essential for all children, birth through age 8.”

Children with delays and disabilities often have delays in play. The DPA-P, presented here, was created to assess how young children, and especially those with delays, are developing in their play activities. The knowledge of a child’s progress in play will help teachers, service providers (e.g., speech pathologists, physical therapists), and family members to identify activities that will support children in learning to play and at more advanced levels. In addition, the results can be employed for the use of play to support language, social-emotional, and motor development.

For more information about the benefits of play, please see materials presented by the Alliance for Childhood (https://allianceforchildhood.org), in addition to resources posted on the websites of the National Association for the Education of Young Children (https://www.naeyc.org) and the Division for Early Childhood, Council of Exceptional Children (https://www.dec-sped.org).

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