Early Childhood Educational Research

Issues in Methodology and Ethics

Carol Aubrey, Tricia David, Ray Godfrey, Linda Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781135711429
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

Provision of education for children under five has recently become a political concern. At the same time, this relatively small field has been attracting increased research attention, with many early years practitioners seeking routes to initial and higher degrees. This book offers essential guidance for researchers and newcomers to the field, outlining opportunities in research as well as useful, sensitive and appropriate methods for researching childhood education.

Part I
Changing concepts and methods in early years education research

1 Researching early childhood education

What’s the use of research?

It is an interesting paradox that as the certainty of research evidence is called more and more into question (for example following the bovine spongiform encephalopathy – BSE – controversy and other similar debates which have made press headlines), there is an increasing demand for practitioners in every field of service to the public to develop ‘evidence-based practice’. Moreover, the Treasury is calling for the ‘best evidence possible’. It is ironic that it took the BSE crisis to produce an effective regulatory system for animal foodstuffs and it is now illegal to feed lifestock on meat and bones from feedmills and farms in Britain. Slaughter houses are required to ensure that animal body parts are not resold and used in feed. Meanwhile in other parts of Europe recycling of insects, algae, used fat and cooking oils, besides the carcasses of all kinds of animals – including dogs, cats and rats – is still permitted, although scientists have discovered a link between transmissible spongiform encephal-opathies (TSE) in cats and dogs and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans. Professor Mac Johnson of the Royal Veterinary College and an adviser to the Economic Union Scientific Committee in The Sunday Telegraph (31 October 1999, p.20) was reported as saying ‘you should not recycle animals in feed … if you do, then you are risking an epidemic like the one we have just experienced’. It seems that the risks uncovered by research go unheeded as ‘the European Commission appears doomed to shut the stable doors after diseased animals have already bolted into the food chain’.

Meanwhile teachers, doctors and social workers are all urged to improve the quality of research, evaluate it more carefully and publicise it more widely. For those in education in England and Wales, the Teacher Training Agency (TTA) is urging evidence-based practice as a central tenet of its aims to create a climate of greater professionalism in schools, and funding for small-scale research projects and for teachers who have findings to disseminate from research conducted for higher degrees is also on offer. However, while the TTA does not expect every teacher to begin conducting research, it is expected that teachers will read research reports, make informed judgements about them and then apply, if appropriate, the findings to their own work.

A recent evaluative report (Hillage et al. 1998) criticised the failure in uptake of the findings of educational research in the UK. Not only the researchers themselves were censured for failing to disseminate findings effectively, but policy-makers (for failing to wait for and use findings before leaping on to make new policies, such as the National Numeracy or Literacy Strategies) and practitioners too were criticised. The latter were, according to this research team, simply not accessing research knowledge, although they were forgiven because their lack of time to scour research journals, to reflect and discuss findings with colleagues, was given as an excuse.

In the field of early childhood education, much is in fact already done on two fronts: through dissemination of existing research and through the sponsoring of new work. Practitioners can gain access to research findings through conferences at which researchers are invited to speak and through the pages of ‘popular journals’ with a wide circulation in schools and nurseries, such as Nursery World and Child Education. This is not to say that more could not be done! Many early years advisers have lamented the poor or nonexistent budget for seminars, conferences and continuing professional development, especially for those working in the voluntary and private sector nurseries. However, with the new Early Years Development and Care Partnerships with funding through the government’s Standards Fund there is the chance for inter-agency professional development with improved training opportunities.

In terms of new knowledge production, indeed, it seems that worldwide there is interest in the earliest years of life and their importance for lifelong education. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), whose main focus is economic as its name suggests, is currently conducting a survey of the Early Childhood Education and Care provision in thirteen member states – the UK being one of these. Publishers seem more eager than ever to contract books about learning during the first years of life. In other words, there is finally, after a century of (mainly women’s) calls for the importance of early learning to be recognised and appropriately funded, a ‘window of opportunity’ which those of us working in this area of study cannot afford to miss.

So, what is research and how will it help us during this time of unprecedented interest and development? What is the use of educational research? Research was defined by Lawrence Stenhouse (1975) as systematic inquiry whose results are placed in the public domain. In relation to research on child development, Schaffer (1990) went further to distinguish five characteristics of the scientific method as:

• empirical, that is, based on direct and verifiable observation of relevant phenomena
• systematic, that is, executed according to an explicit plan designed in advance and followed exactly
• controlled, in order to isolate the important factors and possible patterns of relationships among them as well as control of extraneous factors so that associations between particular factors can be identified.
• quantitative descriptions, which allow greater rigour and exactness in theory construction and in testing of theory whatever the nature of the original data collected (photographs, tape-recorded discourse, video-recording or more traditional numerical data)
• public scrutiny by others working in the same field in order that all aspects of the research process are subjected to criticism, according to agreed and legitimate criteria.

There are many different ways of conducting research, as we shall explain in later chapters of this book, but the main point is that research must be scientific and provide as reliable a knowledge as possible. The researcher should know why certain methods and procedures have been selected as fittest for the purpose and an awareness of the limitations should be acknowledged. This makes it vital to recognise the ways in which different parts of the process are all integral to the research to make a coherent whole. Moreover this is the reason that before publication research studies are critically reviewed and, hence, accepted as legitimate by the research community.

One of us worked with the late Corinne Hutt as a researcher in the 1970s. One day someone came to see Corinne, knowing that she was an expert in observational techniques and that she had used film for research purposes (this was before the days of video). Corinne was told in triumphant tones that this person had collected ‘sixty hours of film’ on her research topic. Corinne was unimpressed. ‘So what? It’s easy to do that – it’s what you now do with it that counts.’ What Corinne meant was that the recording of ‘real life’ was only part of the process. How you systematically and logically draw together data from the raw processes, how you analyse the data, the rigour in your analysis, the interpretation of those data, and the subsequent dissemination of the research results are vital elements of the research process, demanding many research skills as well as integrity. The process also demands the ability to be both reflective and reflexive. A researcher needs to engage in reflection throughout to ensure that the research is appropriately conducted, in order that the experience and understanding brought to the research is fully exploited and with proper attention to ethical considerations. Reflexivity means that one is aware of one’s own potential influence on the research process, as a result of one’s standpoint and assumptions. It means taking account of the advantages of the principal enquirer’s common human experience whilst remaining alert to potential sources of bias.

Additionally, studies which monitor the progress or quality of what is happening in a school or nursery are thought of as educational evaluation and sometimes not regarded as true research. This seems a pity because often evaluations of policy and/or practice provide just as much that is new or useful as original research projects and it is at times difficult to see where the boundaries between the two actually are. However defined, the evaluation process is intimately related to research, whether external and accountability-oriented or more democratically-oriented, self-evaluated and concerned with needs, values, costs or effectiveness.

Unlike some of our European Union (EU) partner countries, the UK has not had a tradition of government-funded and sponsored small-scale practitioner research projects. However, evaluations of education programmes, processes and outcomes are often carried out in early childhood contexts using controlled research procedures.

Perhaps the most compelling reason for conducting and understanding research is that we are human and human beings are by nature curious, born to try to ‘make sense’ of any situation in which we find ourselves. The research process by its very nature attempts to generate reliable knowledge which can justify its cost in terms of time and money. The latest twist in the BSE controversy suggests that reliable knowledge may lead to an effective regulatory system in one member state of the EU which is not automatically pursued by others as the global agricultural economy develops. More and more we need high-quality research to promote new knowledge because the world is ever-changing. This provides a sound knowledge base upon which to respond to change. In fact society today is probably changing at a faster rate than at any earlier time. Further, we are more aware of the ways in which citizens need to make informed decisions about their own lives and those of their children. Those decisions need to be informed by research, as far as research is able to provide answers in what Beck (1992) has called ‘the risk society’. Early years professionals, moreover, will be stimulated to increased skill in enhancing the development and learning of young children and, hence, their effectiveness through reading and incorporating sound research findings in their practice.

In this book we are focusing on issues related to educational research concerned with the period of life internationally recognised as early childhood – birth to eight years. In the UK ‘early years’ or ‘early childhood’ has recently been used in official documents to mean the years before statutory schooling and in some cases it means only children aged three and four. But because the longer view is taken internationally and because we wish to reiterate the importance of continuity across this age span, we ask readers to take this longer perspective.

In Chapter 2 we discuss the ways in which societies think about young children, the assumptions they make and the consequences for both the children themselves and for those who educate them. The consequences of seeing three-and four-year-olds as a homogeneous group and as different from two-or six-year-olds are far-reaching. A teacher known to us, highly respected by colleagues and parents alike, who was carefully providing for the individual needs of the children in her reception class of four-and five-year-olds was taken to task by an OFSTED inspector who said he could not see how her curriculum changed on the child’s fifth birthday (statutory school starting-age) to take account of the statutory nature of the UK National Curriculum. Examples of this kind cause one to wonder about the misunderstandings between the two people involved. Perhaps we should not too hastily jump to conclusions about an inspector who had no early years background. It is possible that all he was signalling to the teacher was the statutory nature of the National Curriculum (although it is generally agreed that the National Curriculum should not be applied until a child begins Year 1, the year the child becomes six, not immediately the child passes the fifth birthday). Further, a note in the teacher’s planning might have sufficed, to show that as the child had now attained statutory school-age, a shift in planning from the areas of learning used by Schools’ Curriculum and Assessment Authority (SCAA 1996) for children under five to the subjects of the National Curriculum would be demanded, even if what the child actually did would seem very much the same to that child. This example serves to illustrate the misunderstandings which can arise when examining early childhood education even with a detailed knowledge of the educational and socio-cultural context. Moreover, research is especially important when change is occurring or being contemplated so the following section provides a brief overview of the changing UK context.

Early childhood education and care: A brief history of the UK context

The provision of services for children under eight in the UK has a long and mixed history. Soon after the Education Act 1870 the elementary schools provided almost exclusively for the children of the working classes. They were intended to enrol children from the age of five, in order to ensure that a future workforce could learn to read, write and become numerate, as well as to become respectful and law-abiding citizens. In summary it was important that girls and boys acquired the kinds of skills which were then deemed necessary for the fulfilment of their future gendered positions in the home and workplace. That children younger than five were often found on the bottom benches or the steps of the galleried classrooms is evident from inspectors’ reports from that time. In many areas this was the result of kind-heartedness, rather than some view of the potential of early schooling, for it usually happened in areas where children from poor families would roam the streets, a danger to themselves and others, if they were not brought into the schoolhouse. The choice of a compulsory admission age of five years was not decided upon as a result of any kind of educationally informed consultation. Compulsory school starting age was introduced in the Education Act 1870 as part of a wider parliamentary debate about establishing a national system of elementary education. It arose through pressure from industrialists who felt that if children were to be schooled for six years, then better to get it over with as quickly as possible. Young children had also long been cared for by local women running ‘dame schools’. However, the women inspectors’ report of 1905 argued that young children should be cared for and educated in a different way, through proper nursery schools. Sadly, their vision remains to be achieved almost one hundred years on and the outcome of their protest meant that most elementary and primary schools blocked the admission of children until at least the year in which they became five. The Education Act 1944 did place a duty on local authorities to provide nursery education for three-and four-year-olds but this was enacted through the opening of nursery schools and classes attached to primary schools in only a minority of areas, usually those in areas of traditional female employment, with a tendency to be Labour-controlled.

Further developments in the forms of provision for children under five were:

• publicly-funded day ‘rescue’ nurseries offering children time away from very ill or troubled parents
• fee-paying playgroups (now often known as preschools) – initiated in the 1960s by middle-class parents in areas where there were no public nursery schools
• private nurseries – which offered either early education and/or childcare to cover parents’ working hours, again charging fees
• childminding in minders’ own homes
• nannies and au pairs in children’s own homes
• a range of other provision – such as parent and toddler clubs, community groups and workplace creches (for further information about this period and the developments see David 1990)

What this ad hoc development has meant is that we are left with a very different situation from that of many of our neighbour countries in the EU. Where we have a miscellany of different services, with differently trained staff, countries such as France and Belgium cater for high proportions of their young children in publicly-funded nursery school classes. These are now making further developments in order to offer more comprehensive facilities such that parents’ hours of work are covered, the children usually remaining in the setting with which they are familiar. Similarly, in the Scandinavian countries, provision which began as a response to women’s needs for childcare is now being refined in order to attend to the educational potential of that provision (see David 1993 and 1998).

The UK is at present alone among EU countries in offering only part-time publicly-funded nursery provision. Children in the UK are often required to attend several different settings over their first five years, some even attending two or more settings within one week or one day. This type of discontinuity hardly bodes well for children’s learning. The reforms set up by the last government which put in place a comprehensive programme of policies and initiatives to raise standards from preschool to adulthood were unlikely to solve this kind of problem and it will require considerable effort on the part of those involved in enacting developments resulting from the current government’s policies to overcome the muddle and fragmentation inherent in the system (for a fuller discussion of some of the issues see, for example, Moss and Penn 1996; Nutbrown 1996b).

Young children’s early education does not take place in a vacuum. Having examined the changing education and care context of young children it is necessary to consider the earliest and most intimate influences on the young child’s development. Most importantly, this development begins in the family and parents are the primary educators. Thus what has happened to parents before the child was born and what is happening to those parents now is of utmost importance to a young child. One important aspect of studying early childhood is the ne...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Tables
• Figures
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Part I Changing concepts and methods in early years education research
• Part II Early childhood education:changing research practice
• Part III Early childhood education research in action
• Part IV Current policy, perspectives and practice in the field
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Appendix 3
• Appendix 4
• References