Saturday, May 17, 2014

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?”

3 comments:

  1. I agree that the chart assignment was pretty challenging if one is looking to be thorough and provide clarity for future reference, but yet still achievable. Choosing a topic was not too difficult for me, choosing sub-topics was where my challenge came in because then my sub-topics were board enough to be actual topics, therefore I had to review my choices of sub-topics,

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  2. Like Kiendra, coming up with a sub-topic was my stumbling block. It took a minute or more to decide which terms to enter, but I enjoy learning definitions that will help me define what type of research design I'm more comfortable with and how to interpret those that seem to be above my head. I think the chart will become easier as we continue to identify more methodologies and definitions.

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  3. What a great choice of topic! I can't wait to learn more. You did a great job narrowing down your choice of sub topics to meet your topic of interest. What do you think your research question will be?

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