Research Questions

These are questions that I am interested in learning more about over the course of my

academic career

Year 1 Semester 2

Question #1:
How has the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the self-regulating abilities and skills of children in early childhood care?

Question #2:
How has the change from traditional reading to "iPad readings" impacted children's literacy skills?

Question #3
What are the benefits or drawbacks of unstructured ECE in comparison to traditional ECE

Year 2 Semester 1

Question #1:
What effect will $10 a day child care have on ECE pay and retention?

It should come as no surprise that I am a policy guy. I love talking about the policies that various governments plan to or have implemented, and how we can improve upon these policies. The policy plans I find the most interesting are education plans, with a specific focus on how we make education more affordable. Since the $10 a day child care plan was announced I have loved it, it is the exact type of policy I advocate for in most other fields. However, as I have learned more about the field of early childhood education and care the more problems I see with the plan. I still love it, but I feel it is half baked. Particularly, I have seen no real plan from the federal government to handle the ECE pay and retention issues that have plagued our field for so long now. As this policy begins to roll out I want to see the differences in pay between the centres that adopt $10 a day and those who hold out. This way we can gauge the success and failures and build towards a better policy in the future.

Question #2:
What effect will $10 a day child care have on quality student experience?

As mentioned previously I really like policy, I love $10 a day, and I feel the policy leaves a lot to be desired. If we have fears about the plan not properly addressing the needs of educators then there is a good chance it will not meet the needs of students. By looking at the quality drops or spikes in centre’s that have or will adopt $10 dollar a day we can see if the funding plan that the government has laid out is feasible in both creating an environment that children can succeed in as well as a workplace educators can live with. If the centres are well funded then there should not be an issue, but if the $10 a day plan does not provide adequate funding then children may be at risk. If this is successful then without a doubt other countries across the world will want to replicate it. But if it is not successful then we need to be able to point to what went wrong and how we can fix it

Question #3
Does going to preschool (or equivalent child care facilities) contribute or build resistance to academic burnout later in life?

In recent years we have tried to put more and more of a spotlight on mental health. The conversations surrounding stress and burnout have been a major area of focus, especially when looking at the impact that the current schooling system has on our mental health. Every class we have taught us the importance of helping the children develop things like self-regulation, and resilience, that our job should be to help children develop the ability to deal with stresses of life. So my question is how far does this go. Do the skills learned in an early childhood education setting help people later in life when they may be dealing with academic burnout. I have dealt with academic burnout many times in my life, and I believe that finding ways to better build resistance to burnout should be a goal for our society. Perhaps we could break this down into small parts, which curriculum style does the best job at building resilience to stressors? I have learned to love the Reggio-Emilia approach in my time in Curriculum Studies, but the only real way to know if it is superior to something like Montessori we should take the time to see the long term effects of these policies.

Year 3 Semester 1

Question #1:
How can we integrate literacy learning in to active games?

Question #2:
How does physical literacy learning in childhood impact physical activity as an adult?

Question #3
How young is too young to start talking about topics such as rights, government, and the child's role in the world?

Year 3 Semester 2

Question #1:
What role are apps like Reflex and Knowledgehook having on student math abilties?

The WRDSB has paid for every student to have access to the online math learning tools Refelx and Knowledge Hook and expects that they are being given enough time each week/day to practice on these programs. I am wondering what effect these programs actually have and whether they are truly better than traditional math learning.

Question #2:
What role do programs like reading buddies play in the literacy development of kindergarteners?

When I was in school, we always did reading buddies, but in the class I worked with they had scrapped reading buddies and instead simply let the grade fours and kindergarteners run around outside together. I wonder if Reading Buddies has an effect on the literacy development of kindergarteners and if the program should be revived.

Question #3
How can we lesson curriculum load on educators while still ensuring students are taught enough information to succeed?

One issue my cooperating educator brought up is that the government is that the government keeps cramming more and more into the curriculum, yet there is not more time to teach it. In fact, they have reduced the time for all other subjects since math and language now always must have an hour of lesson time. This has sadly put teachers in a position where they have to triage their own curriculum and hope they do not miss anything vital. I wonder if there is a way to fix this issue