Engage

Project Overview

The goal of the Engage project (formerly the PLAY project), funded by the LEGO Foundation and implemented by RTI International and Global TIES for Children, is to develop and validate instruments to measure adult support for child learning through play in centers and schools, as well as homes. Although global work on learning through play is growing rapidly in many low- and middle-income and conflict-affected contexts, few tools exist to measure how adults can support learning through play. Through work in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, this project has developed tools for the early childhood and primary schooling years that assess support for child and student engagement and learning through play. These tools are now being validated in collaboration with implementing partners in a variety of contexts.

Few assessment tools have been developed to assess support for children’s engagement in learning, including learning through play, in some of the principal settings in which children spend the most time in their formative years: homes, centers and schools. This project aims to fill that gap by building a conceptual framework of constructs for adult support of child learning through play; developing tools from a mixed qualitative / quantitative approach rooted in practitioner, community and family perspectives on learning through play in different country contexts; and testing those tools in the field.
1. To develop a conceptual framework of constructs to guide the measurement of support for learning through play across age ranges and contexts.
2. Through a mixed-methods process of cultural contextualization, to develop, pilot and conduct validation of measures of support for learning through play of the following types:
  1. Home (observed caregiver-child interaction and caregiver survey measures for 0-2 year olds; observed caregiver-child interaction and caregiver survey measures for 3-5 year olds)
  2. Centers and preschools (observational classroom and teacher survey tools for pre-primary education, ages 3-5)
  3. Primary education classrooms (observational classroom and teacher and student survey tools for primary education, ages 6-12)
We used a three-phased process to develop the first set of draft tools in partnership with local research and implementing organizations in Colombia, Jordan, Ghana and Kenya:
- With input from global and local advisory groups, we first conducted in-depth qualitative interviews, focus groups and observations to understand the perspectives of teachers, caregivers and students regarding learning through play and the self-sustaining engagement and agency that underlie learning through play.
- Second, we conducted small-scale piloting and further adaptation of draft tools across each of the age ranges in early childhood and primary school-ages.
- Third, we tested the tools by using them to collect data in a small sample of centers, schools and homes, with each tool represented by at least two country contexts.
This process, and analysis of the data it generated to understand the structure of these tools, allowed us to generate a complete first draft set of tools that was ready to be fully-fielded for further validation with a set of implementing partners in Bangladesh, Colombia, Sierra Leone, South Africa, and Uganda. The validation process, which seeks to link the Engage toolkits with child-level learning outcomes, kicked off in early 2023 with these partners, working across age-groups and contexts. The long-term goal is to develop a set of fully-validated tools to inform NGOs, ministries, and researchers’ efforts to support learning through play for children in multiple country and cultural contexts.