Building on existing research applying app maps (Israelson, 2015), the authors take an ideological orientation to broaden app evaluations and consider participatory literacies, social and communicational practices relevant to children's everyday digitally mediated lives. Drawing from their North American elementary classroom studies on children's…

This article investigates processes of engagement in social pretend play between children with autism (age range 3.6 to 7.2 years) and adult play partners, using a large corpus of conversational data. We take a qualitative discourse analytic approach to investigate the metacommunicative strategies used by the children. Our initial framework for…

As play researchers, the authors have an interest in the diversity of experiences and views people have on play. They are also curious about how the concept of play could be better understood in order to shape advocacy efforts in support of increased opportunities for children and adults to play. In Fall 2011, based on their initial adult play…

Recent developmental work demonstrates a range of effects of pedagogical cues on childhood learning. The present work investigates natural pedagogy in informal parent-child play. Preschool-aged children participated in free play and a toy task with a parent in addition to a toy task with an experimenter. Sessions were extensively coded for use of…

Red colobus monkeys are playful primates, making them an important species in which to study animal play. The author examines play behaviors and responses in the species for its play initiation events, age differences in initiating frequency and initiating behavior, and the types of social play that result from specific initiating behaviors. Out…

This paper describes the use of play in the psychotherapy of a latency child from a severely traumatised background. It considers the meaning of play in relation to the role of the psychotherapist and to psychotherapeutic technique and explores its functions in terms of the child's development. The paper documents the psychotherapist's learning…

Forces are experienced in actions on objects. The mechanoreceptor system is stimulated by proximal forces in interactions with objects, and experiences of force occur in a context of information yielded by other sensory modalities, principally vision. These experiences are registered and stored as episodic traces in the brain. These stored…

Given enormous global challenges, alongside nurturing children's creativity, professional creativity has perhaps never been more vital ([0100] and [0190]). This paper considers how a small, qualitative, co-participative study in an inner city children's centre, explored practitioner perspectives and practice related to creativity understood as…

This article describes a novel approach to experience sampling as a response to the challenges of researching the everyday lives of young children at home. Parents from 11 families used mobile phones to send the research team combined picture and text messages to provide "experience snapshots" of their child's activities six times on each of three…

We studied the gestures used by children with classic Rett syndrome (RTT) to provide evidence as to how this essential aspect of communicative functions develops. Seven participants with RTT were longitudinally observed between 9 and 18 months of life. The gestures used by these participants were transcribed and coded from a retrospective analysis…

Whilst impairments in joint attention, imitation, and pretend play are well documented in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), the developmental trajectories of these symptoms remain unknown. The main objective was to explore these trajectories in a sample of children at risk for ASD between the ages of 2 and 4 years. After screening…

Rehabilitation researchers who investigate complex interventions are challenged to describe the "active ingredients" of their interventions: the reason(s) why a treatment is expected to be effective. Interactive Computer Play (ICP) is an emerging complex intervention in rehabilitation practice and research. The purpose of this scoping review is to…

Children's play experiences demonstrate many benefits for learning, cognitive development, and self-awareness. Evidence reveals that children require regular amounts of play. Despite this evidence, play has been rapidly disappearing from the home, the neighbourhood, and the school over the last two decades. Curriculum reformers present empirical…

This study explores the effectiveness and challenges of a collaborative drama project conducted in a beginner-level Japanese language university class. The project had two main objectives: firstly, it encouraged students to focus on linguistic elements during the process of writing, examining and editing the scenario, and to embed it in an…

Executive functions enable children to pay attention, follow instructions, apply what they have learned, have those "aha!" moments in which they grasp how multiple facts interrelate, think of creative solutions, obey social norms such as waiting their turn and not butting in line or jumping out of their seat, mentally construct a plan,…