building research competencies throughout my career

This course has opened my eyes to another level of early childhood education/studies. The methods of conducting research have expanded in my eyes and opened new career paths for the future, as well. I enjoyed learning about triangulation and the methods used during qualitative research. As a student, I am familiar with research but until this course we never discuss multiple methods data collection.

 After this course, I realized how in-depth the planning and designing of research studies can be to complete a competent study. Each step is important to the overall completion of the study, itself, and the contribution to the early childhood field of study.

The one challenge that I met well learning about research methods, was the amount of time needed to conduct these studies. I believe that for a study to be valid, the research must be given the time to complete all aspects without any time constraint to pressure their results.

The final question to answer would be how my perception of the field changed throughout this course. I would not say my perception changed about the early childhood field. However, my eyes are open to the research that still needs to be completed and the advancements that need to be made within the field to better serve the children we educate and their families.

It has been a great eight weeks working with my fellow colleagues and learning about their work experiences.

Early Childhood Australia

I chose to look into the Early Childhood Australia webpage. Below I have listed to link and basic information provide by Dr. Myers. 

Early Childhood Australia: This is the Australian equivalent to the U.S. based NAEYC. You can access several links to early childhood research from the menu on the left side of the home page.
http://www.earlychildhoodaustralia.org.au/

Some of the current research topics being explore "down under" are school readiness, baby sleeping, child health and childhood obesity, and the Early Learning Years Framework. These resource themes are available on the sidebar on their homepage. 

I was wondering around the webpage when I noticed their code of ethics portion after exploring I was excited to see a literature review within this section. Ethics is very important for me as an educator and student.  

I enjoyed reading a bit about the Every Child magazine and the guidelines for authors.