Dramatic play affordances of natural and manufactured outdoor settings for preschool-aged children
Natural playgrounds foster dramatic play in preschool children
According to the 2011 U.S. Census, a quarter of children under five spend the majority of their waking hours in childcare facilities. It is important that the outdoor play areas at these facilities are designed to support children’s healthy development. The purpose of this study was to enhance understanding of how natural and manufactured outdoor play settings foster developmentally important dramatic play. The specific research questions were: “Can a natural playground provide more dramatic play affordances than a manufactured equipment-based playground?” and “Do natural behavior settings afford more dramatic play than manufactured settings?”
The investigation was grounded in an ecological framework that focused on the concepts of affordances, the perceived functions an environmental feature can provide to a certain individual, and of behavior settings, discrete spatial and temporal units that afford a certain behavior or certain behaviors. The location of the study was a preschool in Utah that has access to a “natural playground” as well as an equipment-based “manufactured playground”. The study participants were the 24 three-and-one-half to five-year-old children that were enrolled in the preschool, of which seven were boys and 17 were girls. These students were observed playing for an hour each day for ten days on the natural playground and nine days on the manufactured playground over a seven week period.
The observations were organized in several ways. For each playground, the researchers defined “distinct spatial units based on intended behavior affordances, such as paths for traveling, sand pits for constructive play, or spin chair for functional play” and categorized these as either natural or manufactured (fabricated, often mass-produced elements). Children’s dramatic play behaviors were also coded based on whether they were solitary dramatic, sociodramatic or complex sociodramatic according to an existing scale that uses the persistence of a play episode as well as the following five behaviors to indicate the presence and maturity of dramatic play: imitative role play; make-believe with objects; make believe with actions and situations; interaction; and verbal communication.
Each 30 second observation interval of a given child was used as a unit of analysis. As was expected, complex sociodramatic play did not occur frequently – previous studies suggest that self-initiated dramatic play may only account for 6 to 25 percent of overall preschool play. In the context of this study, 13 percent of the play was dramatic in nature, with 1 percent coded as complex sociodramatic, 9 percent coded as sociodramatic, and 3 percent coded as solitary dramatic play. Statistical analyses were used to determine the effect of the playground on the frequency of dramatic play.
The playground type and the type of play were found to be significantly related, with the natural playground affording more dramatic play than the manufactured playground. The most notable factor in the dramatic play observations was the availability of malleable child-scale constructive play props such as “loose parts” and enclosure areas. The natural playground also encouraged exploratory interaction with the natural world, an experience that was almost entirely absent on the manufactured playground.
Overall, the study’s findings suggest that, in addition to affording more dramatic play and thus perhaps encouraging more cognitive and social learning, natural playgrounds can also fulfill “the intent of providing children with self-initiated nature learning and peer teaching, which is limited in a modern urban setting.”
Citation
Cloward Drown, K.K., Christensen, K.M., (2014). Dramatic play affordances of natural and manufactured outdoor settings for preschool-aged children. Children, Youth and Environments, 24(2),
