Eliciting Young Children's Perceptions of Play, Work and Learning Using the Activity Apperception Story Procedure

Perceptions of play, work and learning were elicited from 111 children aged between 3 and 6 years using the Activity Apperception Story Procedure (AASP). The children were based within 6 research sites that were chosen to represent different types of early years provision. The AASP is a two-part procedure. Firstly, it requires children to sort 26 photographic stimuli depicting various classroom activities into those that they perceive as either play/work or learning/not learning, depending on condition. The photographs contain pictorial cues to facilitate the identification of activities as play, work or learning. Findings revealed that children were able to distinguish play/work and learning/not learning. The children appeared to categorise the activities using the cues and there was a positive correlation between play/not learning and work/learning. Secondly, the procedure requires children to re-categorise and justify their choices for a smaller number of photographs. This data revealed that whilst children did attend to the anticipated cues, other cues were important. Patterns within the justification data suggested that the development of perceptions for play, work and learning might be related to experience. The usefulness of a generic definition of play is considered, as is the importance of understanding children's perceptions of playfulness from an educational perspective.