Poster Presentation

I'm putting up my poster for anyone to comment further.

This is base on work-in-progress method, therefore, no results are collected yet, nor any further work has been done. This is merely for our Poster Presentation Assignment, and I am taking this as an exercise for future work.


Feel free to comment, the research topic is not what I am currently looking at.

Why study Child Development?

Yes. Why do I have to study Child Development, when what I am doing is more on children's interactivity with some things.

Well.. its a very basic knowledge that one have to know in order to further develop understanding about children. It is an essential subject if you are working involving children.

While I was reading this particular book, Childcare & Education, there were some questions that really interest me:

Q1: How children develop in different cultures and in different sorts of society?

I had this course about globalisation when I did my master and was always relating to children no matter what issue involves. The master course I did had really open my mind in a way that we, people, the nation, all countries are actually moving towards being more globalised. Whenever big organisations takes some actions, we should be thinking of going global. Just like the internet has helped us to become nowadays.

Far countries seems so near. Malaysia and UK seems so near when it comes to having a daily internet phone calls conversation. It's very clear as if, I'm talking to that person right infront of me. Plus, with the technology, having a web camera, also helped a lot! Like Parents-in-law, wanting to see their grandchildren, like in my case. That is just how things work.

So... This had make me think further on the next question:

Q2: What is the same about all children? (in all aspects)
: What is different across cultures in the way that children are brought up?

I have always been wondering, when I read some research papers on dyslexia, how English was the hardest language to learn for them. And how true is that, really?! Are there not other language which might be harder than English? Has any research been done on this?

I find learning arabic a bit difficult. People said that Japanese is very easy to learn. And how about my mother tongue, Bahasa Melayu? I could not try Chinese, as they have their special way of accent, like a music, you get me? But I'd love to learn Spanish, which for me, I think is quite easy to learn. Por Que No? Si... (mind the spelling.. i just know how to pronounce it...)

Anyway, back to Question 2, What is the same about all children? Is the way we brought up children are all the same? It sure is different in some ways depending on culture. I can see the differences, when I was small, Mom and Dad were very strict. Even when I'm a teenager, they were strict as well. Its all because of I'm a girl, but I thanked them, as I do not become that wild or very social, but instead, they succeeded in making me a well mannered person. And same goes to almost all of my close friends. But teenagers nowadays in my countries, are so different.

It was really upsetting, that most of them allow media to influence them...

so what do you think?

will update more.. got to go to my poster presentation...

In the process of understanding...

I am reading this book, which I bought at a carboot sale for only 50p. I've never thought of it being very useful for me now as a researcher. I bought them, just to add my knowledge being a mother. But, the whole book actually does help a lot in my research work now.

I am now starting to understand the different theories that exist about learning and development stages of a human being. From being babies, to toddler, to young children... the list goes on.. but it really is fascinating.

My first mini experiment is about understanding the NORMATIVE DEVELOPMENT. I am trying to relate what I have read with observing young children.

I went to this playgroup yesterday with a few objectives in my mind:
1. The main thing, is for my son, FD to build up his social skills besides being able to play with toys.
2. To observe the playgroup activities.
3. To observe young children play and interact.

I am in the process of documenting what I saw, I hope to be able to build up further understanding and to move on to my next mini experiment.

Anyways, NORMATIVE DEVELOPMENT that I am referring to consists of:

• Physical
• Language
• Intellectual / Cognitive
• Symbolic
• Emotional
• Social
• Spiritual

The above list are also called the PILESS Framework.

NORMATIVE DEVT = a milestone devt of a child.

Understanding Children

Understanding Children is not an easy task to do. After reading some books, I notice that there are so many things to learn in order to understand children.

Being a mother myself does not mean that I know from A to Z about children. I admit that I have to read lots of books to learn about a child's development and progress. I became fascinated at how a tiny baby, that I have carried for 9 months, is developing every day, and there is just so many things that I do not know about. To add to that, a baby actually starts learning from inside the womb, and how does that make sense?

I remembered reading a lot of books on pregnancy when I was having my first child. There are just so many things that makes me wonder on how the development of the fetus inside me is growing, and that he is listening to all the conversation that I have, always there when I was doing all my chores, listening to all the lectures I attended (I was doing my master at that time) and everything that I did is somewhat connected to this baby inside me. There must be some kind of a relation between the baby inside me and the world outside.

Being him, I have always wondered what he was thinking. He must have find it hard to imagine what the world is in reality. Quoting from some people, training the baby (in the womb) to listen to the vacuum noisy sound, will make them so used to it, that they will not be surprised or scared of having the loud sound when they were born. Hmm..

And how is that connected?

will continue..

... my research work...

I haven't been posting anything yet on what I'm actually doing... I guess its pretty much of a confidential thingy.. and as a research student, we can't expose it yet, unless its published. Correct me if I'm wrong... but I am being a bit skeptical on discussing them on the net. I do not want other people to be taking my ideas... which I have (at the moment) loads and loads of them...

As my SVs reminds me, I've got to build up a very very strong knowledge base in order to move forward...

Therefore my first study is to understand the thing that I want to focus later on. I would like to be able to submit a paper for a Doctoral Consortium which the dateline is very very soon... As you can see on the ticker above.. Being able to at least participate in the conference would mean a lot to me.. and I found this exciting opportunity to write in a book, which I would love to participate as well. It would mean a lot for my future career. Really2 hope that I will be able to do that... owh, please.. please...

And so, my draft of my first poster piece is done for tomorrow's lecture, the ATC course, and also my very first draft of an ABSTRACT! Way To GO Girl!!! This would be the first start of my writing up!

Cheerio!

Writing an Abstract...

My understanding of writing an ABSTRACT:

1. A summary of the paper you are writing.
2. Need to have all the important things that is there in the paper.
3. People usually read abstract first, therefore need to make it understandable by all.
4. Can't cheat people by having an interesting abstract, but a boring paper, and vice versa.
5. Abstract = portrays the whole paper.
6. Contains the whole contents of a paper in one short paragraphs.

What we did?

1. GF gave us loads of exercises to discuss about the good and bad way of writing abstract. We looked at a few, and managed to point out a few points.
2. We looked at a few example, to see how people writes.
3. We thought about the things needed to be in an abstract, which turns out to be: the whole paper in one short paragraph of abstract. Cool, eh?

This is basically what's needed:

• Intro/Background
• Aims/objectives
• Methodology
• Findings/results
• Conclusions
• Further work/recommendations

(Thank you GF, for all the slides you uploaded, it certainly is useful for us all!)

And, we also learned about TITLE, which I will elaborate more later...

Cheers...