Play Assessment

Abstract

Play assessment can tell us a great deal about a child's cognitive and emotional functioning. Pretend play is often a part of a clinical assessment, because play is such a natural form of expression for young children (age 4–10 years). Clinicians often infer much about a child's functioning from their observations of pretend play. Standardized play tasks and measures are being developed that can be used in a formal assessment battery. Play assessment can contribute to treatment planning and outcome evaluation.

The Affect in Play Scale: Confirmatory Factor Analysis in Elementary School Children

“…In the field of play, assessment scales such as the NOVA Assessment of Psychotherapy (Faust & Burns, 1991) and the Play Observation Instrument (Howe & Silvern, 1981) contribute to the pool of validated measures. However, they are more focused on play as psychotherapy assessment, and there are few published articles about their psychometric characteristics and normative data (Russ & Cordiano, 2010;Russ & Niec, 2011). A review of studies of the Affect in Play gives evidence of the psychometric validity of this scale.…”