Positive Examples of Research with Children

I chose to write about my experience with research with children. I am very involved with an early childhood community organization in my state called Excel By 5. This organization is made up of city and business leaders (mayor, chamber of commerce, school board, etc.), education (childcare centers, HeadStart, K-2 teachers, special needs teachers), health (doctors, nurses, clinic administrators, health dept.), and parents & families. Each focus group has specific goals they set at the beginning of the year and meet monthly to see how these goals are being met.

Two years ago, one of the education group's main goals was to see how ready our pre-k children were for kindergarten. We contacted UCLA and had the Early Developmental Instrument pilot program performed on all of the incoming kindergarteners in our city. The EDI measured the developmental areas of physical health and well-being, social competence, emotional maturity, language and cognitive skills, and communication skills and general knowledge. Each kindergarten teacher filled out the questionnaire for each of the children in their classrooms. It was sent back to UCLA for analysis. When the analysis was returned to us, we discovered that the community's children were very ready for kindergarten in the developmental areas of physical health and well-being, language and cognitive skills, and communication skills and general knowledge. However, the study showed that children in our community were developmentally vulnerable in their social competence (independence, social skills w/peers, respect, and responsibility) and emotional maturity (inattentive behavior, agressiveness, anxiousness, pro-social and helping behaviors).

This research enable our organization to brainstorm ideas to institute plans of action such as parent trainings, Conscious Discipline, mentoring in the child care centers, and others to help improve the readiness of our kindergarteners BEFORE they get to kindergarten. This was a very positive experience and it benefited the whole community, as well as the children and parents.

Transforming Early Childhood Community Systems - EDI. (2012). Early Developmental Instrument. University of California, Los Angeles.

Personal Research Journey

My topic for the research simulation is “What are the long-term developmental effects in children diagnosed with anxiety and panic disorders?  Are the disorders inherited?”  I’m sure that I will need to tweak this to get it more specific; but I am finding so much information that I’m not really sure where to go from here.  So I will continue searching for sources and decide which ones are viable for the topic I have chosen.

I chose this topic because I had a child in my preschool class who had severe anxiety.  We could not get the mother to acknowledge anything was wrong.  We began communicating with her in October, going over evaluations and assessments and trying to find out how he was a home.  We did our best to help him know he was safe.  He really bonded with his teacher and would only play with one or two children never as a group.  He was learning and when he went to kindergarten, he was not far behind other children in his class.  However, she blamed him not performing academically on the teacher and school; however as time progressed she began to worry herself.  She finally let us know that his father is bi-polar and has severe anxiety (so much so that he cannot hold a job).  But, she waited until the last months of the school year after he went to kindergarten to get him some help.  So now we are going on almost 2 years time. After the second meeting with the psychologist, he was diagnosed with dyslexia and anxiety disorder.  How I wish parents would understand we know what we are talking about when we say something is wrong!  We cannot make diagnoses, but we do recognize symptoms. 

The research chart was interesting.  It really made you search to find the layman’s words for some of the terminology.  Believe it or not, some of the words I chose were hard to find definitions beyond wiki and the dictionary, but I did finally figure them out.  I believe this will be a great asset as we go along to help us with how and why we are choosing references, questions, and other research-based techniques.

I am all ears to hear from you all on suggestions to weed out some of the fluff from my topic.  I welcome your help!

I found a very interesting article that opened up the topic for me.  I hope it will help as a reference to some of you as we continue our journeys toward the completion of a Masters Degree.  It is....

Hudson, J & Dodd, H. (2012).  Informing Early Intervention: Preschool predictors of Anxiety disorders in middle childhood.  PLoS One v.7(8). Retrieved July 11, 2014 from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3414481/