Assessing Learning Without Interrupting Preschool Play: A Practical Look at Play-Based Assessment
It is 10:40 on a Tuesday morning. In the dramatic play corner, three four-year-olds have turned a cardboard box into a fruit shop. The shopkeeper lines up plastic apples and counts them aloud. She loses count at seven, stops, and starts again. This time she touches each apple as she counts. A customer asks for “the big one,” and she holds up two mangoes to compare them before handing one over.
Across the room, the teacher has a checklist that says: Counts objects to 10 with one-to-one correspondence. She has two options. She can walk over, kneel beside the shop, and ask the child to count five apples for her. Or she can stay where she is, watch, and write down what she has just seen.
The first option gives her a clean yes or no. The second gives her much more: a self-correction, a change of strategy, and a size comparison, all inside a game the child chose herself. The problem is that many assessment systems are designed around the first option.
This is the central tension of play-based assessment. The challenge is not whether to assess. It is how to see learning clearly without breaking the very experience that produces it.
Why teachers still pull children out of play
In the intensively observed classrooms, withdrawal was widespread even though assessment could also happen through interaction within play.
Source: Pyle & DeLuca, The Journal of Educational Research.
Most early years leaders agree that play matters. So why does assessment so often interrupt it?
Part of the answer is pressure. Christopher DeLuca of Queen’s University notes that teachers struggle to balance accountability demands, which call for more assessment against curriculum standards, with mandates to teach through play. When a report card needs a clear result, the quickest route is a direct question. (child-encyclopedia)
The research shows this pattern in practice. In a study of 77 kindergarten teachers by Pyle and DeLuca, the most common methods, even during play-based periods, were direct observation and withdrawal, where teachers remove children from play to complete assessment tasks. Video recordings, documentation walls and portfolios were used less often, and teachers found that analysing large amounts of data from digital apps took time and specific assessment skills. (child-encyclopedia)
That last point matters. Teachers do not withdraw children because they do not value play. They withdraw children because the system around them makes it the easiest option.
Which raises an uncomfortable question:
If assessment changes the way children play, are we still observing authentic learning?
What is play-based assessment?
Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42651117
A 2026 scoping review of 33 studies on authentic social-emotional assessment in children aged 0 -8 found that 23 studies (69.7%) used naturalistic observation and 10 studies (30.3%) used play-based assessment. Importantly, 75.8% of included studies focused on preschoolers aged 3–5, making the evidence particularly relevant to your Pre-K audience.
Play-based assessment is the practice of gathering evidence of children’s learning during play and everyday activities, instead of removing them to complete a separate task. The teacher watches, listens, asks light questions, and records what the child does and says. That evidence is then linked to a clear learning objective. The play continues. The assessment runs alongside it.
This is where assessment and testing part ways. Testing is one method; assessment is the broader job of understanding learning. Professional guidance has long supported this wider view. The NAEYC and NAECS/SDE indicators, summarised by NWEA, state that assessment evidence should come from realistic settings that reflect children’s actual performance, and should draw on multiple sources gathered over time. The Division for Early Childhood adds a practical warning: because very young children grow at fast and uneven rates, their assessment scores tend to be unstable, so one-time snapshots are less meaningful.
For curriculum teams, this is the key idea behind authentic assessment in early childhood. A single performance on a single day tells you less than a pattern seen across a week of ordinary play.
Interrupting vs embedding: a side-by-side view
| Question | Interrupting approach (withdrawal) | Embedded play-based assessment |
| When is evidence gathered? | In a separate task, away from play | During play, routines and conversations |
| What does the child experience? | A request from an adult, often out of context | Their own game, with the teacher nearby or joining in |
| What does the evidence show? | Whether the child can respond on demand | How the child thinks, adapts and applies skills in context |
| Main risk | Children may underperform in an unfamiliar setting | Evidence may be scattered if the focus is unclear |
| Teacher workload | Low planning, high interruption | More planning up front, less disruption later |
| Best used for | Checking a specific skill that rarely appears in play | Building a rich, ongoing picture of development |
Withdrawal is not always wrong. If a child never counts during play, a short one-to-one task may be the only way to find out what they can do. The issue is when withdrawal becomes the default instead of the exception.
Four design moves that keep assessment inside play
1. Decide the focus before play begins
Unfocused observation produces pages of notes and very little insight. Riverside Insights, drawing on educator Katie Blue, recommends that teachers choose one or two focus skills per week, observe them through dramatic play centres, and use the findings to plan small groups, new centre setups and home activities (riversideinsights). The focus does not direct the play. It directs the teacher’s attention. This is also why aligning preschool assessment with learning objectives matters so much.
2. Record what you see, not what you feel
“Aarav seemed bored” is an interpretation. “Aarav walked between three centres in four minutes without picking up materials” is evidence. Training materials from Virginia’s early intervention programme ask practitioners to sort statements into objective and subjective, contrasting “appeared bored” with a description of a child holding a crayon between thumb and index finger and making a mark. Objective notes are easier to compare across teachers and across time.
3. Join the play as a co-player, not an examiner
“Count these apples for me” turns the shop into a test. “How many mangoes do I owe you?” keeps the shop running and still reveals counting. The question lives inside the role. The best questions sound like part of the game.
4. Look for patterns, not moments
Urie Bronfenbrenner once warned against assessment becoming “the science of strange behavior of children in strange situations”. The same training guide reminds practitioners that one-time observations, even in natural settings, can be insufficient and misleading. A child who counts correctly once has shown something. A child who counts correctly in the shop, at snack time and while tidying blocks has shown much more. This is the territory of developmental progress tracking.
What the evidence can look like
Evidence from play is rarely a single mark. During block building, a child whose tower keeps falling may begin widening the base without prompting. The evidence is not the tower that finally stands; it is the change in strategy. During a retelling of a favourite story, a child may put three picture cards in order and then add a fourth event of their own. During role play, two children may negotiate who is the doctor and who is the patient.
Narrative approaches offer one useful model. In New Zealand, Learning Stories are written around three moves of noticing, recognising and responding, with the family invited to add its own perspective. Whatever format a school uses, the principle is the same: evidence becomes valuable when it connects what the child did, what it shows, and what happens next. You can explore this further in how to collect evidence of learning through play.
Where technology helps, and where it does not
Technology can reduce the recording burden, but it cannot replace professional judgement. A 2024 preliminary study tested a video-based assessment tool built on GPT-4 Vision with five teachers. Teachers saw potential for observing students in authentic contexts and lowering assessment anxiety, but reported slow video processing, limited understanding of context, and ethical concerns about consent and data privacy. The authors concluded that such tools should support teachers’ observations rather than replace them, keeping a human in the loop.
For early years settings, the lesson is simple. Tools should make observation lighter, not make children more visible to cameras.
The question curriculum leaders should ask
Zoom out from the fruit shop, and the real design question appears.
Can every teacher in your organisation use this approach consistently, without drowning in paperwork?
The National Research Council’s guidance, summarised by NWEA, is useful here: an assessment strategy should match its stated purpose and take only the minimum time needed to get valid results. That applies to observation too. Collecting evidence that no one uses is not rigour. It is workload.
A few questions help test any system. Is each observation tied to a learning objective? Are developmental rubrics written as observable behaviours that two teachers would read the same way? Do teachers know when to use a checklist and when to use a rubric? And does the evidence change what happens tomorrow?
If a rubric produces a score but does not change the teacher’s next decision, what purpose is the rubric serving?
These questions sit at the heart of a wider Early Years assessment framework, and they only work when observation feeds a full assessment cycle of evidence, reflection and next steps.
The Objection Worth Taking Seriously
Curriculum leaders who’ve heard this argument before tend to raise a fair concern at this point: if evidence can come from anywhere a shop game, a sand table, a clinic corner how does one adult with twenty children avoid either missing everything that matters or trying to document everything that happens?
The honest answer is that not every moment needs capturing. The skill worth building in a team isn’t vigilance; it’s judgment about which moments are load-bearing. A moment is worth capturing when it connects to a specific learning objective the teacher already has in mind, when it shows a change rather than a repetition a new strategy, a corrected error, an unprompted attempt or when it settles a question the teacher has been holding about that particular child. Everything else can be allowed to simply be play, which, for a four-year-old, was always going to be the point of the activity regardless of what any adult was watching for.
Where KODEIT Pre-K Fits
The fruit-shop problem is a curriculum design problem. Teachers can only assess inside play if the lesson structure makes room for it. KODEIT Pre-K builds this in through its PLAY Framework (Prepare, Lead, Activate, Yield), where observation opportunities are part of the lesson itself.
| What teachers need during play | How KODEIT Pre-K supports it |
| Low-pressure checks at the end of learning | The Yield stage uses simple assessments such as thumbs up/down, drawing responses and exit ticket questions |
| Space for children to show thinking in their own way | The Activate stage includes choice-based exploration and mini-reflections through words, gestures or drawings |
| Clear tools for recording observations | Each Teacher Book includes an Assessment & Observation section with rubrics, checklists and reflection tools |
| Consistent descriptors across teachers | The curriculum includes 90+ structured rubrics for tracking developmental progress |
| Evidence gathered over time, not once | 270+ formative and summative evaluations, including observations, portfolio tasks and milestone tracking |
The aim is not more assessment. It is assessment that fits naturally within play-based learning, so teachers spend more time noticing children and less time pulling them away.
A final thought
The shopkeeper who lost count at seven taught her teacher something important that morning. She showed not just what she knew, but how she recovers when she gets it wrong. No worksheet would have captured that.
Good assessment should help us see learning, not interrupt it. As curricula become more structured and accountability grows, the programmes that stand out will be those that design assessment into play from the start, instead of adding it on afterwards.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What is play-based assessment in preschool?
A: It is the practice of gathering evidence of children’s learning while they play, instead of removing them for separate tasks. Teachers observe, listen, ask questions within the play, and link what they see to learning objectives.
Q: Is play-based assessment the same as having no assessment?
A: No. It is still planned and purposeful. The difference is where the evidence comes from. Teachers set a focus in advance and record specific, objective observations that can be tracked over time.
Q: Should teachers ever take children out of play to assess them?
A: Sometimes, yes. If a skill rarely appears naturally, a short one-to-one task can fill the gap. The concern is when withdrawal becomes the main method instead of an occasional supplement.
Q: How can teachers observe play without being overloaded?
A: Focus on one or two skills per week, use short objective notes or simple checklists, and look for patterns across several moments rather than recording everything.
Q: Can AI or video tools replace teacher observation?
A: Current evidence suggests not. Early studies show promise for recording and reflection, but also limits in understanding context and serious privacy concerns. The teacher’s judgement remains central.