My week 5 of 2019
Another short week. A short week with a lot of things to do.
Just before the year finished I got the coordination of the students in the last year. The person doing this job left to do mission work in Peru. But our dean knew this would happen a year ago. Nothing has been done to till her last work week. This is something that really will get in the way of my research work. This week I had a meeting with my dean to talk about my tasks. She will not take away the responsibility, but she will have people to help me do the work. But I have to give her an overview of all the tasks. But meanwhile, the tasks like teaching, guiding students while writing their bachelor thesis, work for reviewing, are still there and will continue. In the past, I worked to days dedicated to some specific tasks. It helped then, maybe it will again.
This week I visited two students for their performance assessment. This is their final assessment of their teaching. Both did a good job.
I also had to finish the planning of 2 groups in the final year.
Literature
During waiting moments I try to read a little. So now I have read chapter 2 of “A toolkit for measuring early childhood development in low- and middle-income countries” by Lia Fernald Elisabeth Prado, Patricia Kariger and Abbie Raikes. This chapter is about determinants in early child development. Context, environment, and caregiving are some of the most important determinants. Development is a continuous process across childhood. Some processes do not follow a linear process; some even have sleeper effects. Sleeper effects mean that some children’s abilities at one age do not predict the developmental outcome for many years but emerge later with strong predictive power.
In figure 2.3 you can see a timeline for brain development as presented in the book
Snow and Van Hemel (2008) say that the breadth and depth of behaviors that can be assessed increase with age, and the advancement in communication and other skills during the preschool and early primary years. For me, this is very important because I will be measuring the abilities of children in kindergarten and grade 1. Those of kindergarten cannot write yet!
Different authors like Hanson (2015) and Noble (2015) have evidence that economic status in the United States is associated with children’s brain development and function.
Experiencing poverty during childhood can have permanent effects. Black, Hess, and Berenson-Howard (2000) show in research done in the United States the developmental scores of children in low-income households are in the normal range during infancy and then decline in comparison to normal samples during the preschool years; this pattern is not apparent in middle-income samples. I want to measure children from similar income households so that this will not be a factor in my research.
Up to chapter 3: Measurable skills and longer-term impact.