Getting children to play together cooperatively depends less on their personal social skills and more on what they are doing – especially if they are not friends – a study shows.
"Play nicely, children," has been a familiar plea of stressed-out parents and teachers since time immemorial. Now, new research suggests that getting children to play together cooperatively may depend less on their social skills than the type of play involved – and who they are playing with.
In a new study, researchers at the Universities of Cambridge and Sussex found that children who are not already friends play "in sync" with one another more when they are given a task to complete. Simply letting them play freely, by contrast, does not produce the same collaborative back-and-forth.
The research divided 148 children aged six to eight into pairs of friends and non-friends. Each pair completed two activities: an open-ended play session and a goal-directed drawing task, in which they had to work together to create a picture.
Researchers measured the children's "connectedness" – how much children were talking about the same topic – to understand how far they cooperated, shared ideas and communicated coherently.
On average, connectedness rates were higher during the drawing task than when the children were playing freely. A closer look, however, revealed that the change occurred almost entirely among the non-friend pairs, whose connectedness during goal-directed play shot up by about 25%.
Dr Emily Goodacre, from the Play in Education, Development and Learning (PEDAL) Research Centre, University of Cambridge, said: "When I first saw the results, I thought: 'This doesn't make sense – why would this only happen among non-friends?' The answer is probably that friends have shared experiences and an intuitive understanding of how to play together, but non-friends lack that familiarity and might benefit from being set a goal."
"When we think about children's development, we tend to look at the individual child – but more and more research is telling us to pay attention to who they are interacting with and the wider situation. This is important when thinking about education – especially issues like how to organise group activities in classrooms."
Connected communication is important for social coordination. While many children will sit side-by-side using the same toys but essentially play alone, connectedness describes moments when they are actively coordinating their play. "Connectedness is partly about teamwork, but also about learning to negotiate with others and respond to somebody else's feelings and needs," Goodacre said.
Previous research by the PEDAL team has indicated that whether children connect during play has less to do with their individual socio-cognitive abilities than might be expected. The new study investigated this further, using data gathered in five UK schools.
Each child was asked to identify their three best friends. They were then organised into a mix of friend and non-friend pairings.
The researchers videoed them playing in two different ways. First, the children were given a Playmobil treehouse toy set and asked to play however they wished. Next, the researchers gave them a drawing of a tree-trunk and asked them to turn it into a picture of the treehouse. Because they only had one pad and a few colouring pens, the children had to work together to complete the drawing.
The team analysed the recording for passages of connected talk – moments when children said something linked to what the other child had said. Each pair was given a connectedness score: a percentage measure of the rate of connected conversation.
Across the entire group, the average rate of connected talk rose by about four percentage points – a statistically significant amount – during the drawing task. When the researchers dug into this further, however, they found that it was almost entirely because the non-friends' connectedness score jumped from 44% to 55%. Among friends, the rate of connected talk was almost identical: 48% during free play and 50% during goal-directed play.
This does not necessarily mean that friends were less collaborative. Close friends may rely more on non-verbal cues or a shared sense of how to play together, meaning that the goal-directed task did not substantially alter their communication patterns.
Anecdotally, Goodacre said the difference was clear in the recordings. Conversations between non-friends were often more functional and less excitable or creative, but the shared goal encouraged them to listen and respond to one another.
"Children who are already friends can play and do things together in lots of different contexts," Goodacre said. "On the other hand, if a teacher or parent wants children who aren't friends to collaborate, a shared goal may help them communicate more effectively. They may need more support to play together than simply giving them toys and asking them to play nicely."
The findings are published in the journal Infant and Child Development (DOI: 10.1002/icd.70089).
