When I think of Research...

I have learned so much from this course that research is not that scary! Research requires lots of thinking on design, ethical consideration, confidentiality, validity, equity consideration and if it has significant value to the field. I never thought of how research could be unethical to participant in the process of getting a sample. 

At first, I thought research requires supports from scientist or at least professional with a doctoral degree to ensure the quality and validity of the study. I learned that this is totally wrong! Anyone could do any research! Research needs detailed planning and a specific hypothesis as a starting point, and then determines if qualitative, quantitative or mixed research methods should be implementing. Most importantly, we need to consider the ethical side as well to ensure all the procedures are ethic to all participants. 

While doing research in early childhood, it is easily to involve interviews or conduct observations on children. Researcher need to ensure the research should always consider having any methods in the child’s learning environments, such as their school or home. If it is observation-based research, it is critical to have the least disruption to the children’s learning opportunity. There is debate on how children should have to right to consent themselves to the research, but I believe children do not have the ability to understand the research. Therefore, we should always have parents or guidance consent to any research in early childhood. As an educator, I would love to support any research that could help our children; however, I would love to know the details of it- questions or procedures that children will go through. I believe an orientation in the family’s home language would help to make the parents understand the content better and feel more comfortable to release their child to the research.
 

Because "research" is a new topic to me even though I did a research paper in my previous degree, but I feel like this course is more in depth. One of the challenge I have was understanding the readings. Some of the readings seem easy to read, but the content is hard to understand. My little trick is to google search on some trusted website or scholar web site on the terms or concept that I am not familiar with. And by reading my colleagues' post helps a lot as well! 

As a result of this course, it helps me to reflect on the professional life in terms of if my practices is being equitable and ethical to all children. Am I being inequitable when I am thinking a child is being challenging because his behavior is little aggressive than others? I tried to use the term active children instead of children with challenging behavior sometimes, and use more positive description to describe the child’s behavior instead of labeling it.