Precision in the Learning Through Play Intervention

We know from pretty large body of research that early adversity affects the development of prefrontal cortex, the very front of the brain that's really important for goal-directed behavior-- more specifically, for executive functioning. And so my thinking was that we want to try to target very early the development of this important brain region. When started to partner with Childhaven, that was really fantastic opportunity to try to put these ideas into practice. And so we developed preschool classroom game playing intervention where we were able to compare classroom games as usual, or activities as usual, with very structured, 20-week program that involved scaffolding and building higher and higher level, rule-guided behavior through play. When we started the games, our kids played the games every single day after lunch time. They all got to have turn. We have "helper day" chart in our room. And so whoever's helper day that was, those are the two kids that got to lead the games. So the game playing, what we thought about was how to increase the executive functioning skills, and really specifically more about cognitive development. And Sylvia Bunge gave us an array of different kinds of games. So we looked at the 10-week time period. That was the dosage. And we chose five games. And there was one game every two weeks. What we found was that as group overall, the children who were engaged in the executive function game playing actually improved on several measures of executive functioning at the very end. Interestingly, when we looked more closely at the data, it turned out that there was subgroup of kids who improved, and other kids who didn't improve. And we wanted to better understand why that is, what differentiated those kids. And it turned out that the kids who had pretty good attentional focusing skills at the beginning of the intervention were the ones who were able to take advantage of the game playing and show bigger improvements in cognitive flexibility, which is higher order skill. And so we took from that this idea that it may be that first, children need to have sufficiently good ability to just focus on specific rule, specific task to be able to then graduate to the next level of being able to switch flexibly between tasks. And so with that insight in mind, we thought about ways that we might be able to intervene earlier on with children who don't have good attentional focusing skills. And we learned about some research that colleague named Phil Zelazo was doing at the University of Minnesota where he had shown that mindfulness meditation practice in preschoolers, also disadvantaged preschoolers, was beneficial for attention. We thought, why don't we try to meld together his mindfulness meditation training with our executive function game playing training. So we then did another iteration at Childhaven where we put the two together. And here, what was interesting was that all the staff ended up implementing it in pretty different way across classrooms. And it turned out that there was only one classroom that showed really nice benefits. And this was Angie's classroom. Well, we used the chime, the chimer. And we would-- my kids would once week hit the chimer, and it went off. We would start out counting loud, and we went from loud to soft. And most of the time, majority of the time, we would get to 15. And so started using it more than just clean up time. would use it when it's time to go outside, lunch time, different times in my classroom, would help get their attention and make my room little more easier to come together. We got Angie on the phone, and we just pumped her for information about what was her secret to her success. And of course part of it is that she's very skilled teacher. But was there anything else? And one of the things that we noticed was that she just took one of the mindfulness practices, which was using chime and using it to transition throughout the day. And she also just played specific game with children for whole week, and then transitioned to the next game, and then the next game, rather than just doing jumble. And we think that that could have been one of the key ingredients, is to allow children to build on their skills over the course of week, but then switching to another game so they don't get bored. When we talk about breakthrough outcomes, think we made good stride in our first round of 20 weeks. But our second one wasn't as successful in that way. And then we looked at the data to find out why, which we have some good information about that. There's lot of intervention research out there that has pretty minimal effects. Group effects that are not that impressive overall. And if we really want to take this to the next level and show maximal impact, we need to understand for whom and why particular intervention is working. And for that, we really need to look at the individual child level. And then eventually, we need to be able to look at children at first pass, and be able to say, OK, this child would benefit more from intervention This other one would benefit more from intervention There's not going to be one size fits all. And so we've found it extremely valuable to be able to look at that level of detail.