ABSTRACT
Chapter 11 presents the technical analyses that underlie the construction of the DPA-P. It includes a description of what the DPA-P was designed to measure, which is focused on how children’s thinking develops based on what they show you. We provide details on the origins of the play categories, based on the literature and our own observations. We summarize how we generated and refined different versions of the assessment. The chapter provides details on how the instrument was standardized, including aspects of the toys, the setting, the participant sample, and the procedures of administration and scoring. We provide our analyses of interrater reliability, internal consistency, standard error of measurement, and types of scores for determining what an individual child knows in concrete terms. Also included is a discussion and our analyses of validity for the DPA-P. We present our efforts to simplify the assessment for ease of use, without compromising the quality of the information to be gathered and analyzed.
