S ummary . Despite interest in whether play is important in learning and development, little firm evidence exists. Some recent experimental studies have shown that encouraging fantasy and sociodramatic play in pre‐school children may lead to gains in many wider aspects of competence. These gains have been ascribed to the increase in play. A critical analysis of this work reveals that insufficient control for the tutoring experience was used; competence gains may have been due to the adult contact in tutoring rather than to the play per se . A study is reported in which observations of both play and skills tutoring revealed that the conditions were matched for tutor verbal contact. In these circumstances, differential advantages to the play‐tutored children were few, and were quite specific to sociodramatic play experience. It is suggested that the most parsimonious explanation of the previous studies is that most of the differential gains in wider aspects of competence were due to differences in the quality or quantity of tutor‐child interaction.
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Smith et al. (1978) studied this question.