When I Think of Research...

For so many they are unaware what Quality Rating and Improvement Systems are. A QRIS is designed to measure, rate, and disseminate information about the quality of early care and education programs including licensed child care centers, home based programs, Head Start and Early Head Start programs, and state prekindergarten programs. A QRIS publishes tiered quality ratings using “stars” or other quality designations for the tiers for each participating program based on its performance on quality standards related to curriculum, assessment, the learning and caregiving environment, staff-child interaction, family engagement, staff qualifications, and administrative practices. 

Why is this important in the field of early childhood?

There are so many benefits for young children and their families when they are enrolled in a center that has been quality rated.  QRIS are intended to improve the quality of early and school-age care and education programs through the alignment and coordination of systemwide initiatives. A QRIS may offer States several opportunities:

• Increase quality of early care and education services.
• Increase parents’ understanding and demand for higher quality early care and education.
• Increase professional development opportunities, benchmarks, and rewards for a range of early care and education practitioners and providers.
• Create a cross-sector framework that can link standards, technical assistance, monitoring, finance, and consumer engagement for programs in a range of settings, including family child care homes, child care centers, school-based programs, Head Start programs, early intervention, and others.
• Develop a roadmap for aligning many pieces of the early care and education system, such as child care licensing, prekindergarten and Head Start program oversight, national program accreditation, early learning guidelines, subsidy administration, technical assistance, training, quality initiatives, professional development systems, and others.

Those who would benefit from my research simulation are the students and their families.  I also believe that teachers, and administrators also benefit from being quality rated.  The students benefit from an improved environment, highly trained teachers, new and improved teaching techniques and a more relaxed environment.  This lends itself to help boost healthy development and school readiness.  Teachers benefit from being better trained and the ability to find new methods that may be more effective.  

What I have realize is as teachers we conduct research every day.  We research activities, we observe their behavior, we conduct focus groups when trying to identify the wants and needs of the students and their families.  Research and early childhood goes hand and hand.  Education is a world that changes each week.  There is a new method, or technique and research study trying to target the best way to interact and teach children.  I can admit that I have never really paid much attention to the efforts and the intricacies of research studies, however learning what I have about how data can be collected and use to highlight a specific topic and gather the desired results, I have gain a deeper respect for researchers and the research they conduct.  Even though I was intimidated by the content at first, I appreciate the education I have received throughout this course and I am looking forward to implementing some of the methods and approaches in my smaller but focused research.

Research Around the World

This week I was tasked with reading about international research topics.  I chose to review the topics addressed on the website Early Childhood Development Virtual University (ECDVU) Sub Saharan Africa (SSA) http://www.ecdvu.org/ssa/major_reports.php .  I was delighted to find so many informative articles written to highlight the needs and interests of many African Nations.  So many of the articles focused on issues that are common in the united states.  For example, in Ghana they are researching supervision of Early childhood environments and in Eritrea they are concerned with the quality of childcare through training and involving parents.  Here we also research how parent involvement improves the quality of the childcare experience for the children. The research paper that stood out to me is the study in Malawi that discussed the development and implementation of the National Action plan for the children in Malawi.  The objective of the project was to facilitate implementation of national policies designed to ensure efficient and effective care, protection, development and participation of the young and the vulnerable children in Malawi. The project involved the identification of strategies for coordinating the development and implementation of a
2003-2013 National Action Plan (NAP) for the Survival, Protection and Development of Children in Malawi, facilitating the development of the NAP, including strategic activities that are aimed at providing care and development to all children without any discrimination.  This issue is very similar to the research I have done on the Quality Rating and Improvement System (QRIS) and its intended purpose. 

 What I found most surprising is that there are little to no differences in the approaches to the ones in the United States.  It behooves me how people can believe that we are so different because we reside in different countries. However, what is evident is that the overall intent is to produce methods and approaches in policies that best benefit the children.  The website allowed me to see how using the culture and the indigenous stories can be added as a benefit to influence the communities to participate and support early learning programs in the different countries.

Another great study that I found very intriguing is   Involving Fathers in Early Childhood Care and Development by Rosemary Hua.  This article explained how the perception of only women should rear the children and it is a woman's job. "In most Nigerian cultures, the responsibility of taking care of young children is seen as that of women rather than men. This indicates that bringing up children is regarded as a subordinate role, rather than a complementary one. During one of the training workshops in a community, one of the fathers made a statement that “caring for little children by men does not enhance the self-image of the man.” Furthermore, a caregiver in an ECD program in one of the communities reported that a lot of children who constantly absent themselves from the centre-based activities have been traced to  2 those with fathers who are less supportive of the program. This lack of support is also associated with lower developmental performance levels by the children" (Hua 1986).  What is expected of the men in this community is to provide, make decisions and protect their families, while women are nurturers. These roles are culturally assigned to them at birth. There was very low expectation from fathers in raising children. The terms of reference in this study did not permit us to find out whether the fathers actually provide for their families or otherwise.  After participating in this study some of the older fathers agreed that their presence in early learning environments was beneficial to the children.  They were able to provide the children with role models.  It is very similar to how many men in my life feel similarly.  Asking more men to interact in early childhood programs may change their perceptions of their roles in early childhood education or in parenting.  This could result in more male teachers and active fathers in the lives of the children each day.