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Sawyer Harris
Dr. Richard Blanton
HON 310
February 8 2015
Childrens Pretend Play and Creativity
In their research paper Changes in Childrens Pretend Play Over Two Decades, Sandra
W. Russ and Jessica A. Dillon analyze the results of the Affect in Play Scale from numerous
studies to see how childrens imaginative abilities have changed over time. Pretend play refers to
a childs play that involves using imagination to treat one object as something else, and studies
have shown it to be related to some creative processes. The authors find that imagination and
comfort level during play have increased over time, despite the diminishing amount of time
children have for unstructured play time. However, this result appears contrary to the recent
finding that creativity scores in children are on the decline.
The researchers goal was to investigate changes in childrens pretend play from various
studies conducted over a period of two decades. Pretend play has implications for the creative
abilities of children because both share some processes such as divergent thinking, the flow
experience, or being absorbed in an activity, and affect, or expression of emotions. The
authors are particularly concerned about the recent decrease in time for children to free play,
even taking a whole section to cite evidence for the benefits of recess and unstructured childdriven play time. In their paper, they seek to answer the question, how has this change affected
pretend play in children 6 to 10 years of age over the past two decades?
The measure of pretend play used in all of the studies is the Affect in Play Scale, or APS,
a 5 minute play task where a child is given two neutral-looking puppets and three blocks to
play with. The child is instructed to play with the objects any way he or she would like and is
reminded to have the puppets speak aloud. The APS measures the childs ability to pretend that
the toys are more than mundane objects and rates him or her on the following categories:
organization of the plot, amount of imagination put into the objects, comfort and enjoyment of

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the play session, frequency and variety of affect / expression of emotions. The authors of the
paper analyzed the results of the APS in each study and performed a linear regression weighted
by sample size to determine how each category had changed with time.
The results of the regression indicate that childrens imagination and comfort scores have
increased with time, meaning that recently children have shown more imagination and
enjoyment in their pretend play. After an outlier was removed from the data set, a linear decrease
was found in negative affect. No other categories were found to have a significant change. To
explain the increasing scores, the authors offer the explanation that despite having less time for
play, children have found other ways to develop imaginative abilities: e.g. videogames may boost
imagination. Not wanting to guarantee the validity of this outcome, the authors note that the
administration of the studies may have changed more than the children, skewing the results, or
the samples may not be representative of the population as a whole. Perhaps more importantly,
the authors note that their findings seem to be in stark contrast to a recent report that suggests
childrens creativity is on the decline. They offer the possible explanation that children are not
able to transfer their abilities with pretend play towards creative tasks like those administered in
the Torrance Tests.
The authors bring up an excellent concern in their discussion: the APS studies suggest
that children are growing more imaginative, but Torrance Tests show a decline in their creative
scores. The next logical question is: which measure gives a better picture of creativity? The APS
is highly unstructured and scores children during play time, whereas the Torrance Tests measure
childrens creativity in performing a task. An obvious difference between the two is the childs
ability to play any way he or she would like with the APS, whereas the Torrance Tests measure
the response to various prompts that might not be as fun to the child. Perhaps children who have
had less play time embrace the unstructured environment of the APS and relish the chance to

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play, thus resulting in higher scores in imagination and comfort, whereas the relatively restricted
test-like environment of the Torrance Tests is more stressful and may negatively affect childrens
willingness to think divergently. If this argument is accepted, one may conclude that the APS is a
better measure of a childs creative capacity because they are expressing their imagination
however they would like to, instead of being forced to come up with a creative response to a test
question. Furthermore, the authors suggest the possibility that children are developing their
imaginations but unable to transfer the ability to an assigned creative task. Given the contrasting
trends of the APS and Torrance Test studies over time, it is possible that children are not actually
losing creative ability but are simply not responding well to the structured environment of the
Torrance Tests. The authors discuss at great length the decline of recess and the corresponding
benefits being lost; could it be that one negative affect of less play time is poorer performance on
tests? If so, it would be worth investigating whether the diminishing amount of play time could
explain childrens poorer performance on the Torrance Tests, rather than a foreboding creativity
crisis.

Citations
Russ, Sandra W., and Jessica A. Dillon. "Changes in Children's Pretend Play Over Two
Decades." Creativity Research Journal 23.4 (2011): 330-38. Web. 7 Feb. 2015.