Research that Benefits Children and Families—Uplifting Stories

The story I would like to share is about a little girl who had a hard time speaking and walking.   The girl would always fall down when she walked and her balance was terrible. She was just 2 1/2 when she came into the program. She went to the Doctor numerous times and they could not find anything wrong. She had older siblings. They talked for her and assisted her with her daily needs. The educators at her school knew there was something wrong but they did not know what it might be. They begin to collect documentation on her about her behaviors and play in the classroom in hopes of coming to some sort of conclusion.  She was referred to child find and given a hearing test. They found that the little girl was tone deaf. She was referred to a specialist and they found a problem within her ear tubes that although they looked to be formed normally; they were not which caused the sound not to come in. After she had surgery she was able to hear certain sounds. 

Response to Intervention in Early Childhood is so beneficial to children and their parents.  Children that attend quality programs benefit from the programs knowledge of early intervention. In Colorado we have a Response to Intervention process. With this process, children in quality childcare, state pre-school programs or head start programs use a RTI form and gather documentation about the child. This helps educators and other professionals come up with solutions for the child. If children do not qualify for special education help this form follows them into kindergarten and tells their new teacher the child’s strengths and weakness. Early Intervention is very crucial to a child’s development especially in they are not developing at a normal milestone rate. 

“Response to Intervention in Early Childhood: A Case Study” (Rudinoff, 2011) was a mixed-methods descriptive case study. This study looked at how a school district defined an early childhood response to intervention process for children that were not attending the school district. The results of this study showed an increase in the “childcare provider’s knowledge and use of early childhood response to intervention and the relationship between the childcare providers and school district was strengthened” (Rudinoff, 2011). This in turn helped children be ready for kindergarten and also helped with early detection of childhood problems.

 

References:

Colorado Department of Education. 2014 http://www.cde.state.co.us/rti/learnaboutrti

Rudinoff, Rachel. Response to Intervention in Early Childhood: A Case Study. 2011.

http://udini.proquest.com/view/response-to-intervention-in-early-pqid:2440410781/

My Personal Research Journey

The current course I am enrolled in is Building Research Competency. Throughout the first two weeks we have been investigating topics of interest in hopes of   narrowing them down to subtopics for research simulation. The topic of interest I have chosen to research is children that are living in poverty during their early childhood years and how will this affect their lives as they grow.  As I processed this topic internally my first question to myself was why this research topic would be important and who would benefit from the importance of this research. So I narrowed my topic into the subtopic of what the social, emotional, and cognitive ramifications would be for children in early childhood programs that live in poverty.  

As an Early Childhood Professional I have never been on the research end of a task. I am in the process of gathering information for an Early Head Start Childcare Partnership Grant. Unfortunately, the information needed for this grant is very broad without a lot of information available. This helps me prioritize what is important especially if you have to provide information to Policy Makers or others who may be funding the program. 

Some of the insights I have gathered is that I am not as organized as I should be. I am finding there is a lot of interesting topics for research and I am trying to narrow my topic down in case I would need to present the information at a later date. The chart assignment was hard because the terms and concepts are all new and I want to construct my charts for resources for future reference.

My question to my colleagues, “Did you have a hard time narrowing your topic down and if so what were your challenges?”