Research Around the World

I chose to look at the Early Childhood Australia website.  “Early Childhood Australia advocates to ensure quality, social justice and equity in all issues relating to the education and care of children from birth to eight years” (Early Childhood Australia, 2014).  This website contained a lot of information about early childhood education for both parents and educators.  This website also contained many publications. One publication called Research in Practice Series provides practical, easy to read resources for those involved in the early childhood field.  This is a publication that you do have to subscribe to for $70.00 a year.  The topics for the 2014 issues are the following: 

·      Ways of thinking, acting and relating about sustainability

·      Pedagogy:  Programs and relationships in practice

·      Professional partnerships in children’s services:  Working together for children.

This website also had a lot of great information for parents.  Under parent resources there were three headlines:  Children’s health and nutrition, Separation anxiety and Transitions to school.  Each of these headlines contained information concerning these topics.  I did notice that when I found something I was interested in learning more about many times it took you to an article you had to subscribe to or a book you had to buy.   

Reference

                                  

Early Childhood Australia. (2014). Retrieved from http://www.earlychildhoodaustralia.org.au/

Research that Benefits Children and Families

As I was looking at articles concerning the effects of research on children or families I came across the article titled Factors influencing parental consent for participation in clinical research involving their children in Egypt.  After reading the title I thought it definitely related to what we were learning about this week and would be interesting to find out the results.  The purpose of this study was to determine the rate of parents’ consent to participation in clinical research involving their child and to evaluate factors that influenced parents’ consent (Nasef, Shabaan, Mohammed, Kandel, Settin, Zedan, & Fouda, 2014).  In this study only 27.5% of parents consented to involving their child in research.  The most important factors increasing the chances of parental consent were if the research was a clear benefit to the child, if the parents received enough explanation of the research concept from the staff and to learn more about the disease.  One huge limitation of this study was that they “did not propose a specific type of research design to the parents or a specific pattern of patient disease, and this may have made our results more of a subjective parental opinion rather than an actual decision about consent or refusal” (Nasef, et al., 2014, p. 168).  I definitely believe if the parents had a specific type of research that was going to be done or if they truly had a child that would benefit from the research than more parents would consent to their child participating in the research.

In this article they also talked about children participating in a clinical asthma research in the United States.  The parents in this study identified the most important factors in favor of parental consent were learning more about the disease, helping medical knowledge, trials using new drugs, relationships with staff, financial benefits, free medication, encouragement by physician and free visits (Nasef, et al, 2014).  In contrast to the study in Egypt the use of new drugs or vaccines and research using invasive procedure were the main reasons for refusal by parents.  I thought it was interesting to see the differences and similarities in the two countries regarding what was important to the parents.

Reference

                                  

Nasef, N., Shabaan, A., Mohammed, S., Kandel, S., Settin, A., Zedan, M., & Fouda, A. (2014). Factors influencing parental consent for participation in clinical research involving their children in Egypt. Eastern Mediterranean Health Journal, 20(3), 162-168.

My Personal Research Journey

As I was thinking of a topic to research the first one that came to mind was social and emotional development.  I knew I wanted to research something concerning this topic because I feel that social and emotional development is extremely important and can be challenging to teach.  This is my fifth year of teaching preschool but it is already my hardest year when it comes to children with low or few social and emotional skills.  Many of my preschoolers have very strong emotions and they do not know how to handle them.  I have chosen to look at what are the best ways to teach and encourage healthy social and emotional development in preschoolers.  I am hoping the information I learn from this research will give me the skills I need to be a more effective teacher.

Constructing the research chart has been informational but I still definitely feel like I am out of my comfort zone.  The research chart does help me to focus more on what I am reading and to really stop and make sure I understand what I am reading.  At times trying to find research that really pertains to my topic feels time consuming and discouraging.  I am definitely looking forward to all that I am learning but it can be overwhelming.  One article I enjoyed reading this week was called Practices for Enhancing Children’s Social-Emotional Development and Preventing Challenging Behavior. 

Reference

Corso, R. M. (2007). Practices for Enhancing Children’s Social-Emotional Development and Preventing Challenging Behavior. Gifted Child Today, 30(3), 51-56.