EECERA Conference, Prague 2007 Exploring Vygotsky's ideas: Crossing Borders Evaluation of ‘play @ home’ in the Highland

1. EECERA Conference, Prague2007 Exploring Vygotsky's ideas: Crossing Borders Evaluation of ‘play @ home’ in the Highlands Jacqué Fee

2. Evaluating play @ home • Evaluation purpose • The purpose of an evaluation is to assess the effects and effectiveness of something, typically some innovation or intervention: policy or practice • Evaluation should be a collaboration which belongs to everyone concerned with the project or programme and only if people are involved will its outcomes be accepted and valued and will it cease to be a marginal activity • Colin Robeson 1993

3. Evaluating play @ home • Three year collaborative programme between the local authority and the health board. • The evaluation study was jointly commissioned in order to gauge the coverage of the programme and its effectiveness.

4. Aims of play @ home • encourage parents to play regularly with their child (ren); • provide a resource; • increase parents’ understanding of child development and learning; • to promote exercise as fun.

5. Evaluation Design • Literature Review • Interviews • Collaborative Inquiry Groups • Selected case studies • Survey

6. Surveys • A profile survey of every family with a child born during the three years of the evaluation • A questionnaire survey of 10% of those families, followed through each year • A more focused study on 1% of those families, followed through each year

7. Collaborative Inquiry Groups • Collaborative Inquiry is a way of working with other people who have similar concerns and interests to yourself in order to understand your world, make sense of your life and develop new and creative ways at looking at things and learn how to act to change things you may want to change and find out ways to do things better. • Heron and Reason 2001

8. Collaborative Inquiry Groups • Group cycles - Reflective Phase decide focus frame questions • Action Phase collectively agreed work individual inquiry

9. Collaborative Inquiry Groups • The purpose of this particular research instrument was to document the experiences of key personnel of distributing the resource and supporting parents to interact with their children in playful activities and to triangulate this with the perceptions of their client group.

10. Collaborative Inquiry Groups • Examples of ‘action’ • talking to parents/carers • talking to children • collating figures • issuing a questionnaire • talking to other stakeholders in the programme • reading about similar programmes • reflecting on and recording your own experiences of the programme

11. Collaborative Inquiry Groups • Collating ‘data’ • Written material (from self) – report form, notes, bullet points • Written material (from others) – articles, newspapers, quotes, books, documents, questionnaires • Mind or cognitive maps • Verbal discussion –quotes from self and others, opinions, ideas

12. Examples of Learning Points from CIG • “Families are vulnerable at different times in their lives and sometimes it is not always the most obvious that are” • “Play @ home is a useful tool, but I wonder if those who use it well are those who would have ‘played‘ with their babies anyway” • “People sometimes unable to see the importance of play” • “People sometimes are unable to see the need for communication with children”

13. Key messages from Cases Studies • Need for more awareness raising of both of the play @ home booklets and the supportive programmes offered through the play @ home programme in communities. • Role of Health Visitors in helping parents avoid interpreting stages of their child’s development too prescriptively. • Guard against assumption that parents who are professionals have no need for support or information in developmentally appropriate child rearing practices. • Scope for production of supplementary resources such as tapes/CDs. • Capitalising on play @ home as resource for fathers, for example making booklets more readily available in parentcraft classes.

14. Evaluating play @ home • Limitations • Funding • Project • Evaluation • Realistic goals • Whose agenda?

15. Evaluation of play @ home:Main Findings • The play @ home programme had succeeded in supporting parents through providing a resource that was not professional led. A critical factor had been the commitment of professionals to recognising parents as the prime educators of their children and empowering them in that role but also that professionals collaborated at both management and implementation level to ensure the success of the programme.