When I think of Research

Now that we are ending our Developing Research Competency class, I found myself not wanting the class to end. It has been one of the most fun, enlightening, and educational classes for me. This is my fifth class, so that also means I am at halfway point of my graduate studies.

As some of you know, I am a research associate but never had an opportunity to develop my own research. This is where I have become more confident and knowledgeable about the research process. My professional base of knowledge has been enhanced in ways that I did not expect and indeed appreciated.  As I think back to my Week 1 where I developed my class research simulation topic and subtopics, I could see how the class helped me hone my basic skills and thoughts into a finely crafted research question. Most of all, I was glad Dr. Parrish kept assuring us that, by the end of class, we will have something we can be proud of. I am grateful I decided to just enjoy the process albeit with some really stressful weekends of studying!

Sometimes when the weekly reading was not clear, all I need to do was check out our Discussions, and everything would then make sense. Thank you to all of the colleagues in our Discussions. Thanks, Dr. Parrish, for your patience with me.

For me, I appreciated most of all the opportunity to learn about certain methodologies and when and why we would employ quantitative or qualitative methods. I did not realize that there was a third one – mixed method research, and that’s my favorite!

I loved learning about tools that are available to researchers. Tools like triangulation is helpful to know for when we are struggling with certain aspects of the research project or indigenist research that would help us work with the populations that we want to research. Most surprising for me was the allowance of researchers’ personal biases and how to work through the biases. I had never heard about equality and equity and am really grateful to know a few new things about them.

Good luck to some of you who will be doing actual research; I hope I will get an opportunity to apply for funds to conduct my research.

Finally, good luck also to some of you who will continue with classes and to those who are taking breaks. May our paths cross again in the next few classes.

Research Around the World

Early Childhood Development Virtual University (ECDVU) – Sub-Saharan Africa is essentially a coalition of local, regional, and international organizations that support a variety of educational activities and a three-year Masters degree, a one-year Professional specialization Certificate program, and a one-year Graduate Diploma program in collaboration with local universities. Those programs are fully accredited and a part of the School of Child and Youth Care, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia in Canada. Their mission is to “further develop African Early Childhood Development (ECD) leadership capacity as a key strategy in support of child, family, and community well-being and broader social and economic development.”

There is a webpage devoted to 27 Masters’ thesis done in 2004 by the graduate students in ECDVU. The countries represented in the 27 research projects are: Eritrea, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, The Gambia, Tanzania, and Uganda.

The research topics represent a wide range of local and regional needs such as:

*studying the need for training of their ECD staff; leadership skills training for administrators;

*developing a process for local staff to maintain, manage, and own their preschools; how to maintain communication via newsletters;

*piloting whether a Western-based Inclusive Quality Assessment (IQA) can be utilized appropriately and suitably in a non-Western culture;

*assessing of the caring practices in two orphanages and nutrition training program for their staff;

*studying the coordination and supervision of their early childhood development programs;

 *facilitating implementation of national policies to ensure efficient and effective care for young and vulnerable children in Malawi;

*studying how experiential learning benefits young children in Malawi and how to apply their practices to other villages;

*studying parents’ perspectives of the ECD needs in their local communities in Ghana;

*documenting endangered indigenous stories and re-telling them in ECD centers in The Gambia, Ghana, Malawi, and Lesotho; the conclusions were that parents needed to tell those stories at home to prepare them for storytelling at school.

*involving fathers in ECD programs; studying effective school and parent collaboration; how single mothers interact and stimulate their children; how to support working families;

*which ECD models prepare children better for school in Kenya;

*supporting grandparents in taking care of children affected by HIV/AIDS;

*utilizing community resources for ECDs in Eritrea.

(ECDVU, 2005)

The list of research topics represent the same issues that we have in the United States. They have the same concerns for quality administration of early childhood development centers, provision of trainings for staff, and utilization of community resources. They also look at how fathers, parents, and grandparents can help with their ECDs through more collaboration and training. They even have cultural issues where they would need to evaluate a Western criteria. They express concern that their tribal indigenous stories are being lost because children are no longer interested in them.

I always forget how universal such issues are; and this serves as a reminder that we all have similar concerns for our children families, and the communities.

References

ECDVU.org. (2005). Major Projects and Theses. Early Childhood Development Virtual University. Retrieved June 2015 from: http://www.ecdvu.org/ssa/major_reports.php

ECDVU.org. (2005). ECDVU Sub-Saharan Africa: Mission Statement. Early Childhood Development Virtual University. Retrieved June 2015 from: http://www.ecdvu.org/ssa/index.php

ECDVU.org. (2005). ECDVU Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) Program Overview. Early Childhood Development Virtual University. Retrieved June 2015 from: http://www.ecdvu.org/ssa/index.php

What Eye Movements Reveal about Deaf Readers

People test hypotheses and then test them out in haphazard ways with limited data. The danger of this approach is that we can become inappropriately confident about our amateur research outcomes, reaching hasty and premature conjectures dressed up as quasi-scientific conclusions. Sometimes we rely on the opinions or knowledge of others. This is also problematic, as opinions may be based on stereotypes passed down through the generations (Rolfe & Mac Naughton, 2010, p.15-16).

There has always been a contentious debate between reading specialists about teaching reading methodologies – phonics and whole language, or a balanced approach. “A phonics approach focuses instruction on learning to associate printed letters and combinations of letters with their corresponding sounds…The whole language approach is based on the understanding that reading is finding the meaning in written language” (Coordinated Campaign, n.d., para. 3 & 5). The balanced approach takes more than one approach and is more individually tailored for each student. If you read through the entire article, How Children Learn, you can see a general bias toward sounds.

One of the reasons suggested for deaf students’ poor reading skills is because of their hearing loss. Because they cannot hear and read phonetically, professionals, therefore, believe that they would struggle with reading. They surmise that deaf students cannot possibly read without the ability to hear. Thus, the focus on restoring hearing becomes part of the early intervention services.

Historically, there have had been successful deaf readers, and we have not really researched how they become successful readers because of “stereotypes passed down through the generations” (Rolfe & Mac Naughton, 2010, p.16).

As a child of deaf parents, I grew up reading books at home, going to the library to borrow books, and reading daily newspapers. My father told me that we subscribed to three newspapers because they were substitutes for listening to the radio.

Dr. Nathalie Bélanger has devoted her professional research to learning how people learn to read. In her recent paper, she has focused her research on the strengths of deaf people’s reading skills – rather than on their reading difficulties. She said, “Only then can we inform reading education for deaf students” (in press).

Turns out that her research suggest an early onset of word processing efficiency in young deaf readers (Bélanger, 2015). She wrote a paper -- a culmination of her previous research -- that is awaiting publication in the Current Directions in Psychological Science.

“Adult deaf readers (skilled and less-skilled) appear to bypass phonological codes in early word processing” (Bélanger, Baum & Mayberry, 2012; Bélanger et al., 2013). “Based on these combined findings, we proposed the notion of “word processing efficiency” for adult deaf readers. In other words, they process more information within one fixation (larger span, longer forward saccades) and do so more efficiently (no need to regress back as often, no need to refixate as often, more skipping)” (Bélanger & Rayner, under revision).

Dr. Carol Padden (2005) wrote, “We tend to think of fingerspelling as a simple manual system for representing the alphabet” (para.1) and Padden (1998) elaborated how fingerspelling is linked to one of the skills used in reading for signing students.

Will we change the professional paradigms about poor reading skills of deaf students through such research?

“In an early paper, Wadsworth (1984) argued strongly that those affected by research can and should do research: ‘Research is a process legitimized in our society as producing knowledge and therefore ought to be in the hands of those who want to use and benefit from it – particularly when it is information about our own lives.’ (1984, p.iii)” (Rolfe & Mac Naughton, 2010, p.12).

References

Bélanger, N. N., Mayberry, R.I., & Baum, S.R. (2012). Reading difficulties in adult deaf readers of French: Phonological codes, not guilty! Scientific Studies of Reading, 16(3), 263-285.

Bélanger, N. N., Mayberry, R. I. & Rayner, K. (2013). Orthographic and phonological preview benefits: Parafoveal processing in skilled and less-skilled deaf readers. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 66(11), 2237-2252.

Bélanger, N. N., Slattery, T.J., Mayberry, R.I. & Rayner K. (2012). Skilled deaf readers have an enhanced perceptual span in reading. Psychological Science, 23(7), 816-823. .

Bélanger, N. N. & Rayner, K. (under revision). What Eye Movements Reveal about Deaf Readers. Current Directions in Psychological Science.

Bélanger, N. N., Schotter, E., & Rayner, K. (2015) Young deaf readers’ word processing efficiency. Poster at http://raynerlab.ucsd.edu/files/2014/11/Belanger-Schotter-Rayner-Psychonomics-2014.pdf

Coordinated Campaign for Learning Disabilities. (n.d.) How children learn. LDonline.org. Retrieved May 2015 from: http://www.ldonline.org/article/6253/

Padden, C.  (2005) Learning to fingerspell twice: Young signing children’s acquisition of fingerspelling. Advances in the Sign-Language Development of Deaf Children. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195180947.003.0008.

Padden, C. & Ramsey, C. (1998). Reading ability in signing deaf children. Topics in Language Disorders, 18, 30-46.

Rolfe, S.A., & Mac Naughton, G. (2010). Doing early childhood research: International perspectives on theory and practice (2nd ed.). Eds. Mac Naughton, G., Rolfe, S.A., & Siraj-Blatchford, I. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.