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Feasibility study of E-PLAYS

In total, 55 children were approached by schools and of these, 50 consented making a total consent rate of 91%. The participating children for our feasibility study were aged on average 6.2 years old (ranging from 4.8 to 7.8 years), and three-quarters were male (n=38, 76%). The sample was diverse, with 55% of the parent sample coming from minority groups (this compares with 33% in primary schools nationally), and well educated, 55% of mothers and 53% of fathers having degrees or higher educational qualifications (national average 40%). The diversity of the sample is representative of the North London area from which we were recruiting.

The number of sessions per child delivered and the time that this took were recorded automatically by the software delivering E-PLAYS. The E-PLAYS programme comprises 12 sessions and it was recommended that teaching assistants should complete at least 70% of these for the child to gain benefit. The sessions ranged in length from 15 – 30 minutes. Number and length of individual sessions per child is given in the tables below.

Number and length of individual sessions per child

A subset (n = 14) of the teaching assistants delivering E-PLAYS were observed by research assistants using a qualitative guide in order to gain an impression of how teaching assistants handled sessions both with and without a classmate partner. Observation of the Children’s 2nd Independent session was followed by a brief interview with the children using an interview tool called the Fun Tool Kit (Read, 2008).

We noticed the following:

  • All the schools were able to understand E-PLAYS sufficiently to use it. The teaching assistants had to follow instructions to make sure that they set up the game on the correct laptops to proceed with the game for Tutoring session 3, 100% (all 14) teaching assistants managed to do this.
  • Of the 14 children observed, 10 did not attempt to look at their partners’ screens, 3 tried once, but were easily prevented by the teaching assistant and did not try again and only one child tried repeatedly (but was also prevented by the teaching assistant).
  • Of the sessions observed, 12 teaching assistants managed to keep the children on task easily, 2 had some difficulties.
  • Children appeared to learn the basics of the game readily and remembered how to play from previous sessions (with the exception of one child), suggesting that we had gauged the level of difficulty for this group of children correctly.
  • Murphy, S. M., Faulkner, D. M., & Farley, L. R. (2014a). The behaviour of young children with social communication disorders during dyadic interaction with peers, Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 42(2), 277-289.
  • Murphy, S. M., Faulkner, D. M., & Reynolds, L. R. (2014b). A randomised controlled trial of a computerised intervention for children with social communication difficulties to support peer collaboration, Research in Developmental Disabilities, 35(11), 2821–2839.
  • Murphy, S., Joffe, V., Messer, D., Crafter, S., Radley, J., Suntherarajah, S., Bell, K., Corbacho, B., Fairhurst, C., Rodgers, S., Torgerson, D., & Welch, C. (2019) Evaluating 'Enhancing Pragmatic Language skills for Young children with Social communication impairment' (E-PLAYS): A feasibility randomised controlled trial study, Pilot and Feasibility Studies.