Hi everyone!

Hi everyone,

My name is Ayako March. I’m Japanese and I moved here with my first child and my American husband 5 years ago. Now I have two daughters who are five and two.

I am looking forward to knowing about you and sharing our thoughts through this blog assignment!

                               

Aya

When I Think of Research...

One of the insights I’ve had about research is that we have a lot to think to make quality research. It is not all about research techniques. Researchers need to think carefully to collect objective and trustworthy data, balance the benefits and interests of the research and ethics and so on. My Idea about the nature of doing research changed from researchers’ curiosities to social benefits. From research simulation, I learned that it is very difficult to prove relations between some events and a child’s behavior because children become who they are by being influenced by many factors. The most difficult part of this course was the vocabulary. It is sometimes hard to understand what the textbook says. To meet that, I tried to concentrate on grabbing the outlines first and read for details when doing assignments. This course modified my perceptions of early childhood professionals to more academic and influential for the society than I used to think.

For my colleagues,

Thank you very much for sharing your thoughts through the course. They were very important because research is a difficult topic. Good luck on your future courses where I hope to see you soon!

Research Around the World

Researches in the sub-Saharan area seems to relate to training or assessment to improve the quality of the care for children.  The surprising fact is that the quality level they are working on is still very basic such as survival rate, community health and orphanages.  The Australian website introduces the topics like what we see in America. They are for understanding children so that educators and caregivers can provide quality care and education. The surprising fact from a journal from this website is that one in five children living in low-income or single-parent families have mental health concerns. The European one has a lot of interesting and up-to-date topics such as children’s self-esteem in computer and learning and playing in different languages. One of the new insights here is that there are studies done about the challenges of children’s real participation. The noteworthy information/insight is that the interpretation of observation and interviews are always done by adults so what we think is true from the research results might not be true so we have to continue to study about children to understand children more accurately.