Do Children Need Adult Support During Sociodramatic Play to Develop Executive Functions? Experimental Evidence

The cultural-historical approach provides the deep theoretical grounds for the analysis of children’s play. Vygotsky suggested three critical features of play: switching to an imaginary situation, taking on a play role, and acting according to a set of rules defined by the role. Collaboration, finding ideas and materials for creating an imaginary situation, defining play roles, and planning the plot are complex tasks for children. However, the question is, do children need educator’s support during the play to develop their executive functions, and to what extent? This experimental study was aimed at answering this inquiry. The four modes of sociodramatic play were created which differed in the adult intervention, from non-involvement in the play to its entire organization. The play could be child-led (with adult help), adult-led, or free (without any adult intervention); and there was also a control group where the children heard the same stimulus stories as the other groups but then followed them up with a drawing activity instead of a play activity. The study revealed that, firstly, the ways of educator’s involvement in the play differed in their potential in respect to the development of executive functions, and, secondly, this influence was not equal for different components of executive functions. Free play in the experiment was not a beneficial condition for the development of any of the studied components of executive functions, compared to the conditions involving the participation of an adult in the play. Furthermore, the type of adult intervention stimulated the development of various executive functions. The entire organization of the play by the adult had a positive impact of their general development. In contrast, the adult’s assistance in the organization of the children’s play had a positive effect on the development of inhibitory control. The study results can be helpful when considering educational practices within a cultural-historical approach to engaging the potential of play in children’s learning and development around the world.

Playworlds and Executive Functions in Children: Theorising with the Cultural-Historical Analytical Lenses

This paper provides a theorisation of developmental conditions to support executive functions (working memory, inhibition and shifting) in children in playworlds settings, where children and teachers play together in collectively created imaginary situations. Vygotsky's general law of development of psychological functions constitutes the general frame for the analysis of the process of development of executive functions (EF) in playworlds, and the theoretical concepts of drama, social situation of development and perezhivanie are used as analytical tools to examine opportunities of playworlds to support children executive functions.

Duality of Categories or Dialectical Concepts?

The paper explores that CHT contains at least three dialectical concepts and principles; (1) development as drama (dialectical contradiction) and the principle of dramatic construction of the personality, (2) the concept of mediating activity and the principle of qualitative transition and reorganisation and (3) the concept of perezhivanie and the principle of refraction. Rethinking the status of "the social" creates opportunities to overcome a dualism of two groups of factors (biological and social) and introduces the principle of dramatic construction of the personality, which is an intrapsychological result of overcoming social dramatical interpsychological collisions (dramas of life). Rethinking "the individual" in relation to mediating activity leads to the conclusion that by creating and using cultural signs an individual not only creates artificial stimuli-devices for mastering his psychological processes, but actively reorganizes the whole social situation. Dialectics of the individual and social is explained as interpsychological and intrapsychological are dimensions of one "social-individual" or "individual-social" continuum. Drama of real life refracted through the prism of perezhivanie becomes a drama of a personality; intrapsychological higher mental function develops, but remains quasi-social.