My Personal Research Journey

The topic that I chose to research is self-regulation and I had a difficult time narrowing it down to subtopics. My original subtopics were social-emotional self-regulation, cognitive self-regulation, and activities for scaffolding self-regulation skills. Dr. Darragh-Ernst suggested that I narrow my subtopics down even more as my subtopics could each be a stand alone major topic. I wanted to keep self-regulation of preschoolers in my research because it is an important skill young children need to learn in order to be successful in life. Since a self-regulation foundation develops in the first five years of a young child's life, early childhood professionals play a huge part in helping children regulate their though process. So, with Dr. Darragh-Ernst's guidance, I narrowed my subtopic down to strategies that support cognitive self-regulation in preschoolers. 

I found many articles on self-regulation for both social-emotional and cognitive development, and also found that self-regulation is not an isolated skill. Because self-regulation involves different domains, regulation of one domain affects other areas of development (Florez, 2011, p. 2). Early childhood professionals must teach children to regulate themselves through different strategies or techniques such as modeling and scaffolding self-regulation during normal activities throughout the day. Children's thinking affects their emotions and these emotions affect their cognitive development. I also found many articles about how pretend play helps to develop cognitive self-regulation. 

I felt like I spent hours researching cognitive self-regulation as one article would have a footnote to another article, and so on. Sometimes I got lost in what my original topic was as I dug deeper into the articles. I searched the Walden Library and the Wichita State University Library looking for articles about my topic. With so much information available, I had to decide what was important and what was not, which was not that easy. The research chart helped me a lot as far as terms used and the definition of these terms. I also kept going back to the resources from week one to determine creditable articles. One issue I found in research is that it is time consuming! Has anyone found any easier ways to research their topics? Maybe just using key words?  

Florez, I.R. (2011). Developing young children's self-regulation through everyday experiences. Young Children. Retrieved from http://www.naeyc.org/yc/