When I Think of Research...

Studying this course has made me to aware that research is a crucial tool to uncover new knowledge and understandings.  Besides, I have learned that well-designed research based on reliable and valid data can generate meaningful, conclusive findings.

Nevertheless, when doing research, we should not be too ambitious to make a major impact in our findings.  As researchers, we need to be content with making small but meaningful contributions to the ongoing quest for understanding and explanation.

When in planning and even executing stage of early childhood research, ethics issues need to be addressed to uphold the right of participants, young children in particular.  Quality early childhood research should be ethical, transparent, and sensitive, not bring any harms to the participants in the research.

One big challenge in my early childhood research is that it contains general concepts that need to be reduced to measurable elements, self-regulation in particular.  Through reductionism, however, I can convert the concepts of self-regulation and well-regulated behaviors into some definitions that can be measured easily.  For instance, I could not measure how self-regulation a child is, but I could measure how a child behaves in queuing, taking turn to talk, etc.  Hence, reductionism can make my study to have clear definitions of the terminology that are easily measured.

Last but not least, this course has taught us that every early childhood professional should become critical consumer of research. My perception of an early childhood professional is that he/she should be able to detect quality research among the pseudo research, with a mindset and right tools.

As coming to the end of this course study, I would like to take this opportunity to thank my Instructor and  colleagues for their support and advise given me throughout this course.  Many thanks!