BASIC PSYCHOMETRIC VALIDATION OF THE DEVELOPMENTAL MILESTONES FOR CHILDREN’S PLAY IN CHILDREN AGED FROM FOUR TO SEVEN YEARS6

Sa？etak Children’s play is an important activity, which reflects overall children’s development. There is small number of studies that dealt with developmental milestones of children’s play, especially those of children aged up to four years. Therefore, we have conducted a study on 839 children, aged from four to seven years. The main objective of this research is to investigate psychometric characteristics of the three scales for assessing the forms and content of the children’s play (based on developmental milestones for children’s play), from five to seven years of age, by determining the gender differences in the milestones and their correlations with the age of the child. The instrument is called ‘’Milestones Development of Children’s Play’’ (MRDI), which consists of three scales (checklists), suitable for the following age groups: 4-5 years (MRDI45), 5-6 years (MRDI56) and 6-7 years (MRDI67). Results show a satisfactory factor validity of two, from the three rating scales that contains MRDI, with a low but solid reliability of MRDI67, very low but still satisfactory reliability of MRDI45 and unsatisfactory reliability of MRDI56. In the age groups 4-5 and 5-6 years, statistically significant gender differences were found, in the direction of the better performance of girls. The correlations between children’s age and their overall scores on three scales of MRDI are very low but statistically significant only for the oldest age group. The possibilities of potential improvements to these instruments (especially those in the age group 5-6 years), with the purpose of increasing their reliability, but also discrimination, are indicated