Tracking The Relationship Between Play and Executive Functions in Kindergarten Settings
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Ontario kindergarten promotes play as a context for children’s self-regulation development. The relationship between children’s play and self-regulation has been frequently observed in developmental research, and particular interest has been directed to the interaction between play and executive function development. However, research findings have been inconsistent and lacking precision in describing how specific play behaviours relate to the development of executive functions, particularly in classroom settings. In order to compare how specific play behaviours interact with the growth in executive function and self-regulation, this exploratory study examines the association between them and various contexts of play in kindergarten. This research used an observational framework to classify children’s play behaviours along behavioural and social dimensions and conducted hierarchical regression analyses to examine whether individual differences in play behaviours predicted growth in self-regulation and executive function. As it is possible that individual differences in self-regulation and executive function influence how children will play, a second hypothesis was tested to examine whether those differences predicted play behaviours. The free play behaviours Kindergarten students (N = 38) were recorded between the winter and summer of the school year, and direct measures and teacher reports of executive function and self-regulation were collected before and after the observation period. Construction and exploratory play predicted stronger summer executive function, while more frequent play disruptions and parallel play predicted weaker executive function ability. Initial levels of executive function, self-regulation, and literacy did not predict children’s play behaviours. This study presents recommendations for pedagogical practice and calls for a new, more inclusive, paradigm of play in kindergarten classrooms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".