As they play, children do more than imagine--they also invent life-long approaches to thinking, feeling, and relating to other people. For nearly a century, clinical psychologists have been concerned with the content and interpersonal meaning of play. More recently, developmental psychologists have concentrated on the links between the emergence of symbolic play and evolving thought and language. At last, this volume bridges the gap between the two disciplines by defining their common interests and by developing areas of interface and interrelatedness. The editors have brought together original chapters by distinguished psychoanalysts, clinical psychologists, social workers, and developmental psychologists who shed light on topics outside the traditional confines of their respective domains. Thus the book features clinicians exploring subjects such as play representation, narrative, metaphor, and symbolization, and developmentalists examining questions regarding affect, social development, conflict, and psychopathology. Taken together, the contributors offer a rich, integrative view of the many dimensions of early play as it occurs among peers, between parent and child, and in the context of therapy.

Reforming our nation's educational system has created the need for new ways to assess students' performance. The trend among educators, parents, and politicians to accommodate diversity in the student body demands new systems that accurately gauge the progress of students in relation to their peers while allowing for differences in what students know and how they acquire knowledge. This collection of essays addresses the problems--technical, political, and intellectual--of designing such a system.
The first section discusses the concepts of learning that underpin different approaches to performance assessment. These essays compare notions of fixed intelligence and developmental learning and outline the need to acknowledge and support diversity in America's classrooms. The second section considers the political issues surrounding assessment systems that have been pilot-tested in Connecticut, Vermont, and Kentucky. The third and final section reviews design possibilities for future systems to assess both aptitude and achievement.