Observation of Social Participation in Play : adaptation and test of an instrument to observe play and interaction in a peer-mediated intervention targeting social skills and play in inclusive preschools

• Aim. The aim of this presentation is to describe: - the process that we adopted in order to develop an instrument to observe play and social interaction recorded in natural preschool settings; - the contents of the instrument.The instrument will be used in a peer-mediated intervention based on Play Time/Social Time (Odom et al. 1997), where we need a reliable and valid measure of children’s play behaviour and social skill, which would make the external observers able to detect possible changes after the intervention and as a complement to other instruments, as teachers’ impressions ratings (TIS) and structured classroom observations (ICP).Background. The program PTST was translated to Swedish. The contents of the interventions were discussed with students and practitioners and tested in small scale studies, showing a good social validity (Siljehag & Allodi, 2017). A pilot study was conducted in four preschools. The analysis of data from the trial is currently ongoing.Procedure. We obtained an observation instrument that has been used in previous research on friendship for children with autism, the Friendship Observation Scale (FOS) (Bauminger, Aviezer & Rogers, 2004). Its contents matched fairly well our interventions’ contents.  We made a translation and adaptation. The contents of Social Participation Observation in Play (SPOP) were discussed with an expert educator from our team who tested it in field observations in preschool. After her feedback we reduced the number of behaviours to observe, retaining behaviours that were more likely to happen with young children, and that were targeted by the program. Simple Video Coder (Barto, Bird, Hamilton et al., 2017) or other available software will be used to code the videorecorded interactions. It will be used in the study: Social Interaction in play time and language activities (2018-00018) funded by  Skolforskningsinstitutet /Swedish Institute for Educational Research.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Educational Sciences (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

early childhood special education

early intervention

inclusive education

preschool

observation

videorecording

specialpedagogik med inriktning mot utbildningsvetenskap

Special Education with a Focus on Educational Science

Publikations- och innehållstyp

vet (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)