Beyond Trial Counts: Considerations for Measuring Play and Engagement During Early Intervention for Autistic Children

Raulston and colleagues wrote a how-to guide for tracking toddler play and engagement. They focused on autistic children in home or clinic early-intervention sessions.

The team did not run new experiments. Instead they compared old trial-count methods with newer, naturalistic ways to score behavior.

The authors say stop counting rigid trials. Use quick frequency tallies for play actions like stacking a block or rolling a car.

For engagement, they recommend 10-second interval checks or a simple 1-to-5 rating sheet. These tools catch the child’s ups and downs during real play.

Williams (2003) warned that we lacked fine-grained play measures for autistic toddlers. Raulston et al. (2024) answers that call with ready-to-use tally sheets.

Geurts et al. (2008) showed that naturalistic play samples give valid joint-attention scores. The new paper extends that idea to play actions and engagement ratings.

Bong et al. (2021) packed screening into a 15-minute play observation. Raulston keeps the short-play spirit, but shifts the goal from screening to daily progress tracking.

You can start Monday. Bring a clicker counter and a 10-s timer to the next session. Tally each new play act the child shows. Mark engagement every 10 s as high, medium, or low. In 15 minutes you will have a story of what the child really does, not what the trial script hoped for. Share the simple graph with parents so they see progress in plain pictures.