Playing With Ideas: Evaluating the Impact of the Ultimate Block Party, a Collective Experiential Intervention to Enrich Perceptions of Play

Abstract

Parental attitudes shape play opportunities afforded to children in home, community, and school settings. This study presents evaluation of an intervention designed to enrich parent's conception of play and its relationship with socially valued skills and capacities. On the basis of data from 291 racially and ethnically diverse parents/caregivers of young children (median age between 3 and 6) attending an event in NYC, we find the intervention helped parents conceptualize play in complex ways and altered perceptions of its impact on children's current-but not future-lives. Multivariate analyses reveal the causal pathway for these changes as exposure to multiple play sites, rather than time at the event-a finding with direct implications for exposing parents to developmental science in community settings.

Learning Landscapes: Playing the Way to Learning and Engagement in Public Spaces

“…The Ultimate Block Party (UBP) [52,65] served as the first pilot test for Learning Landscapes. UBP sought to transform caregiver attitudes about the relationship between play and learning in a community setting.…”

“…The goal of the evaluation was three-fold: (1) to measure the UBP event's success in conveying 4 core messages about play to caregivers; (2) to determine how well the UBP event's organization supported achievement of its goals; and (3) to learn about people's general attitudes with respect to play in order to inform future strategy for the UBP initiative and other forms of play advocacy. With regard to the measurement of caregiver attitudes, the researchers designed a short survey featuring Likert scale items, open-ended questions, and demographic questions to assess caregiver attitudes and beliefs about play and learning [52]. Results suggested that caregivers' ability to represent different facets of the play/learning connection is a vital component in public awareness and may have been strengthened through direct exposure to multiple forms of play [52].…”

“…Many caregivers do not always see the connection between the two, since although important for cognitive and social development, play has been dropped precipitously from preschool and kindergarten classrooms [51]. A false dichotomy prevails, presenting play and learning as mutually exclusive [29,52,53]. Little research, however, has explored the ways in which caregiver attitudes can be enhanced or changed to align with scientific evidence about the importance of play.…”

“Oh, the Places You'll Go” by Bringing Developmental Science Into the World!

“…The first involves the intervention's resiliency in the face of turbulent real‐world conditions, including high turnover among staff (Farran et al., ), transitory relationships with participants (Dubois et al., ), and changing circumstances in the settings in which the expansion is taking place (Reynolds et al., ). The second emerges from inevitable heterogeneity: variation in children's needs (Roben et al., ); parent, teacher, and community expectations (Weber et al., ; Grob et al., ); resource availability (Reynolds et al., ; Farran et al., ); and the prevalence and form of external constraints on implementation (Schindler et al., ).…”

“…Every intervention designed to enhance child development embodies elements of multiple principles, strategies, and theories of change (Galinksy et al., ; Farran et al., ). When taken out into the world, however, participants are often exposed to only a portion of the elements that were possible (Dubois et al., ; Grob et al., ) and sometimes particular aspects of the program are foreclosed or altered (Reynolds et al., ; Farran et al., ). As a number of the articles illustrate, these considerations require careful and creative measures of “exposure” to the program—conventional notions of dose–response that measure only participants’ time in the program are often too limited to appropriately assess a program's impact, because that impact depends in large part on how they encounter the intervention.…”