Research That Benefits Children and Families

If I had the means and knowledge to conduct research studies about any topic in the early childhood field, I would choose to look into diagnosing and working with children who have learning “disorders” or difficulties. Today, many children are quickly diagnosed with a “learning disorder” such as ADHD and given medication as a treatment. I would love to be able to look into this topic and see what answers research could provide. Maybe there are different techniques that parents and teachers could use rather than medication, maybe certain behaviors are present from a young age and early intervention could help. A long term study could show the consequences-both negative and positive-from medications that are associated with and used to “treat” children with learning difficulties. It would also be interesting to find out if there is a more effective process that could be used in diagnosing learning difficulties from an early age so that appropriate supports and resources can be provided to the child and family and so that misdiagnoses do not occur.

 I think that research such as this would be beneficial to children, families and educators because it could help develop new strategies to enhance and support a young child's development and educational experiences. Other positive benefits could include new knowledge about learning difficulties and the best strategies for working with them, effective supports and resources, and appropriate interventions that could help foster positive development in the child and help them succeed in an educational setting.

My Personal Research Journey

I am excited about doing a research simulation in these upcoming weeks; I know little about research and the processes behind it so this will definitely be a learning experience! After much thought, I narrowed down my topic of imitation/modeling behavior in children to a few subtopics. The one that I chose to focus on for my research simulation is the role that gender plays in what children imitate and model. Are young girls more likely to model behavior from a female adult? Are boys more likely to imitate other boys? Do boys and girls choose different types of behavior to model? Or does gender not even play a role in what children choose to imitate? This subject is really intriguing to me and I have a lot of questions about it!

I chose this topic because for two reasons. First, I am interested in it from a professional perspective. The early childhood field is heavily dominated by females; does this influence what children in early childhood settings imitate? Secondly, I am interested in this from a personal perspective. I have an 18-month old son and am raising him as a single mom; he imitates and models behavior that he sees me do. Would he imitate the same things if he had a male to choose to model behavior from?

The simulation process so far has been interesting. It has been a little bit difficult to understand and take information from research articles, but I am slowly beginning to understand the language and presentation better. I have realized that I have to read certain paragraphs of research articles multiple times to grasp the meaning, but hopefully once I have a better understanding I will be able to tackle it more efficiently! Having a research chart has been helpful because I have come across a lot of new vocabulary; it helps me to have a concrete visual aid that I can build upon.

Research is such an important part of the early childhood field; I expect that I will gain a lot from taking the time to understand and learn about the research process. If anyone has any insights into the research process or the topic of gender and imitation, let me know, I would love to hear some new ideas and perspectives! One website that I came across that has a lot of credible research on a wide number of topics is from the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER), http://nieer.org/, hopefully this resource will be beneficial to someone else too!