A 2020 review found weak rigor behind object-play teaching

The play

In the January 2020 issue of the American Journal on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, Erin Barton and colleagues at Vanderbilt University published Teaching Object Play to Young Children With Disabilities: A Systematic Review of Methods and Rigor. Object play, using toys to build, sort, cause an effect, or pretend, is often taught deliberately to young children with disabilities as part of early intervention, and this review asks how solid the research behind those teaching methods actually is.

What the evidence says

The team examined 27 object-play intervention studies, all using single-case research designs, involving children aged five or younger, coding the materials used, the instructional packages, the settings, and how researchers measured whether play generalized beyond the taught task. An independent index of the same review confirms the 27-study count and the single-case methodology. The authors report that the identified studies showed positive outcomes overall, but that quality and rigor limited how much confidence can be placed in those outcomes, and they note that prior reviews of group-design studies in this area found both stronger outcomes and stronger quality than the single-case literature they examined.

Age fit and safety

The review is bounded to children aged five and younger with disabilities, and its conclusions are stated for the object-play teaching methods and studies it examined, not for children without disabilities or for object play taught informally at home. It contains no product safety findings; it evaluates research methodology and reported outcomes, not toy hazards.

What to look for

Editorially, the review's own caution, that positive outcomes should be interpreted carefully given study quality, argues against treating any single therapy program or toy marketed for teaching object play to children with disabilities as definitively proven, while not dismissing the approach either. The authors call for more replication using strong methodological rigor, which is a reasonable standard for a caregiver to ask a provider or program about directly.

• Is a program or toy claiming to teach object play citing specific research, or just the general idea that toys can be taught to a child?
• Does a provider explain how they measure whether a skill generalizes beyond the exact toy used in a session?
• Is the child's age and specific need actually within the five-and-under, single-case literature this review covers?

The review's honest verdict is promising but methodologically uneven evidence, a reason to ask questions of any specific program rather than to treat object-play teaching as either settled science or unsupported.