When I Think of Research....

              I would like to begin by thanking each and everyone one of my fellow classmates for your time and dedication to this course. It is because of your hard work and feedback that I was able to feel more confident and expand my knowledge about conducting research within the early childhood field.

            As a result of our collaboration, I have gained insight into how the preplanning stages of research should be the area researchers focus on the most in order to avoid complications and increase validity our research studies. Due to the use of children within research, I have also learned the importance of allowing them to assent to the study, in order for them to feel as if they have a voice in whether or not they would like to take part in early childhood research (Mac Naughton, Rolfe & Siraj-Blatchford, 2010).

            My ideas about the nature of doing research has changed as I have learned how I too can conduct research if I take my time and ensure I consider each ethical and validity criterion which were presented within our resources in order to develop a credible research study. Also, I learned the important lesson of no matter how well you plan, design and conduct research, there is no perfect way to accommodate for extraneous variables (Mac Naughton, Rolfe & Siraj-Blatchford, 2010). Through taking time to design the study and consider as many extraneous variables as possible and adapt your design around these variables in the beginning will help, but there will always to a chance an extraneous variable will happen within your study. As long as you explain it within your results section, then you have increased the replicability of your study for fellow researchers (Mac Naughton, Rolfe & Siraj-Blatchford, 2010).

            A challenge I encountered within our course was learning each of the new terms and being able to apply them to the field of each childhood education. Through my fellow classmate’s discussion postings and conducting further research independently, I was able to feel more confident in the challenge of learning and applying the new vocabulary throughout this course.

            My perceptions of an early childhood professional have been modified as I now understand the importance of early childhood professionals to stay current on early childhood research, as well as being able to identify whether or not the studies are valid and the research was conducted with ethical considerations for young children accounted for. Early childhood professionals must be strong advocates for young children and families by sharing research in order to help children meet their full developmental potentials through the application of published research studies. The increased accountability for professionals to stay current on research is an area I have come to appreciate due to the time and flexibility within the curriculum early childhood professionals must tackle.

            Again, thank you to each and every one of you for your support through the course. You have provided me with so much new knowledge about the early childhood field, that I now feel much more confident with early childhood research. I wish you all the best of luck in your future careers and hopefully we will continue to learn from each other in future courses!

Reference

Mac Naughton, G., Rolfe, S.A., & Siraj-Blatchford, I. (2010). Doing early childhood research:

International perspectives on theory and practice (2nd ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.