When I Think of Research...
    Everyone that knows me also knows that I love to read, refer to, and quote research.  I love to read about different research and about the results.  I am always forwarding interesting research articles to my spouse and friends (I am pretty sure they do not read them).  However, the idea of performing the research is a different story.  I want someone else to do all of the work and then just fill me in on what they find out.  I am a curious person with a lot of questions and research helps me to look up and read about the subject to get my answers.  Although I learned a lot in this class, I find that I am still very much on the side of loving research, but not wanting to be involved in the process of performing said research.  The final result interests me very much, but I just do not have any interested in the process of it.
     The biggest insight that I gained was that one study does not have to answer the big question.  I think that research makes many people nervous because they feel like they have to be able to have earth shattering results that will change the world.  Most of us want that.  My insight was that this is just not realistic.  The answers to the really big questions actually come from breaking that big question down into several smaller questions and tackling it a little at a time.  It may take hundreds of studies to answer one question.  We have to learn to accept this and even embrace it because tackling it a little at a time can actually enlighten us to a new avenue or show us that we need to be looking in a different direction.
  In fact, this enlightenment also changed my ideas of the nature of research and about planning, designing, and conducting research.  It also showed me my biggest challenge and how to encounter it.  For me it was all about learning that research is not about one study that answers it all.  It is about many, many smaller studies all working off of each other... like peeling an onion one layer at a time until the big picture is revealed.
     As an early childhood professional, I have learned that in order to find my answer, I must be able to define what I am looking for.  I can't just research which kinds of teachers are more effective; I have to be able to define what an effective teacher is.  I can't ask which children will be more successful; I have to be able to define what successful is.

European Early Childhood Education Journal

     I decided to visit this site to explore some areas that are popular in early childhood education research in other areas of the world.  When exploring this site, I noticed that it was possible to pull up the research articles that were the most read.  This intrigued me.  I wanted to see what articles were of the most interest to visitors of this site.  The most read research articles looked like this:

• Make believe play vs academic skills
• Dynamics of early childhood spaces- Opportunity for outdoor play
• Influence of play context and adult attitudes on young children's physical risk taking during outdoor play
• Perspectives of early childhood teachers on parent teacher partnerships in 5 European countries
• The outdoor environment in Norwegian kindergartners as pedagogical space for toddlers' play, learning, and development
• Emotional complexity of attachment interactions in nursery children
• Children and outdoor environment
• Affordances in outdoor environments and children's physically active play in preschool

     I realized that many of the research articles are also topics that are being researched in the United States.  There were a lot of articles that dealt with learning through play versus academics, family partnerships, emotional attachments, and also a lot of articles that focused on the zero through three age.  These are all areas that I have noticed are areas of focus for us here in this country.  What was most surprising to me was the number of articles focusing on the outdoors and outdoor play.  My own director has talked to me about taking the classroom outside and ordering items that can be used for outdoor learning, so it wasn't a new topic for me.  I just couldn't believe how popular of a topic that this was on the European Early Childhood Education Journal website.  I was looking at the most read articles, and at least one out of three of the articles on the list were examining some facet of  the outdoor environment on early childhood education.  If I could have guessed the most popular topic that would pop up, I would never in a million years have guessed this.  It was really surprising and interesting to me that outdoor play is starting to garner such interest in the world of early childhood education research.