ABSTRACT
The DPA-P was designed for the evaluation of children’s play. This chapter provides direction into the next steps: taking the results of the DPA-P evaluation of a child’s progress in play to develop a plan of activities for intervention. It describes how you evaluate activities at the absence, emergence, and mastery level for developing a plan. Both emergence and mastery are operationalized in terms of the results of the assessment; namely the frequency and variety of play activities observed within a category. We provide a summary of the developmental model as it underlies the philosophy of the evaluation system. We link the DPA-P to a curriculum-based assessment. We also present a brief review of our studies that support the distinctions among mastery, emergence and absence. We provide three case studies to illustrate how one can move from the assessment results to the intervention targets. We offer suggestions for assembling sets of toys for intervention, based on toys available in children’s homes and early childhood settings, to be distinguished from toys used for assessment purposes, described earlier. Finally, procedures for facilitating/teaching play activities to children who are developing more slowly than their peers are presented.
