INTERPLAY: Play, Learning and ICT in Pre-School Education (2003 - 2006)

Project Summary

This project is associated with the Phase II project ‘InterActive Education: Teaching and Learning in the Information Age’. It has been developed in collaboration with Learning and Teaching Scotland, a government-funded agency which develops the curriculum and the role of information and communications technologies (ICT) in promoting learning in Scotland.

The purpose of Interplay is to identify ways of enhancing young children’s experiences with ICT through guided interaction with practitioners, peers and parents. Although there are many manifestations of ICT in nurseries and playgroups, the focus hitherto has been mainly on desktop computers. Using ICT has been seen as a free play activity in which children decide for themselves when and how to use the computer. The culture of pre-school settings values learning through play and child-initiated activities but, in the context of ICT, our previous research showed that this approach can lead to unproductive interactions. Interplay will investigate ways of balancing both child-initiated and adult-led activities to enhance the value of encounters with ICT.

We will work with a total of sixteen practitioners in four pre-school settings in each of two local authorities (West Lothian and Stirling) in a process of guided enquiry. Our enquiries will be supplemented by using a survey of 100 homes and case studies of eight individual children to explore the interplay between home and pre-school experiences. This will enable us to establish ways of building on children’s experiences at home and to address the needs of children who have limited access to ICT. Researchers and practitioners will share observations based on video recordings and photographs of children using ICT and identify ways in which practitioners can provide support within the busy environment of a pre-school setting at the same time as ensuring that children’s use of ICT is enjoyable and rewarding. This collaborative approach will entail identifying:

1. how to create opportunities for learning with ICT
2. how to identify and record interactions with ICT that support learning
3. how to evaluate that learning
4. how to use that information for future planning.

The process of guided enquiry will lead to a practitioner-generated cycle of planning, action and review. We will identify the characteristics of guided interaction and describe a range of tested strategies to enhance learning with and through ICT that are rooted in the dynamics and constraints of the playroom settings and can be adopted more widely.