The topic I have chose is something that I feel very passionate about. As a Developmental Therapist working for Indiana's Early Intervention System, I see many families enter and exit the program. My hope is that when they exit, the child will continue with some form of quality early childhood program before starting Kindergarten. I see many benefits, especially for children with developmental delays, from being in a quality program with other children and quality educators. The challenge I have found is that many parents are not properly educated or informed about the programs available for their children.
For my topic, I have chosen to take a closer look at the knowledge parents have regarding their early childhood education options, and how they are informed. I have discovered that this is a hot topic, yet little literature through articles and research papers. I have found that one of most helpful strategies when searching for literature was to search multiple databases at one, and open up my search up by searhcing other fields and not limiting myself to just educational databases. The other strategy that I have found very helpful was to jot down some key words and phrases that I could use to search this specific topic. Using these strategies have allowed me to find a few great articles that are relevent to my topic of parent educational awareness.
What strategies are working for you? What have you found helpful? What have you found challenging?
I am excited for you to conduct this research. I remember in our prior class when you first became interested in finding out about what happens to the child after they leave you.
ReplyDeleteI am using some of the databases listed on p. 19 in our book to help in my search.
Kristen, I am so looking forward to seeing what you find while working on this project. Parent education awareness is so important so that every child is given every chance that they can to further their education. One strategy that I found to be very helpful for me was to put a cut off year for the database to search. There are tons of articles and any way to knock out ones that we won't use is handy. I think I put my cut off date to 2007 and I noticed that my search was cut down quite a bit. The challenge I am having right now is just being overwhelmed with the abundance of articles.
ReplyDeleteKristen, I believe this too, is an important topic to research. Good luck with your research. One insight I have gained from reading your blog is try to search more than educational data bases. I will do that right away. One of the reasons I stay with education is because of the class we are attending. I believe one of the challenges that children in Indian have is eating or receiving education. Also, is it true that girls education is less important? If either of things are true this to could be one of the reasons families don't understand their options for their child's education.
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