EDUC 6163- Research that benefits Children and Families

This week I chose to look at Option 2 for this assignment.

My research question is: How do students fair later in life when one or more biological parents are incarcerated during their early years (birth-age5)?

I chose this research question because three out of my 11 students have one or more parents incarcerated. In these specific cases the students are being raised by their grandmothers.

After a little research on the topic of children of incarcerated parents i found that 1.7 million children under the age of 18 have incarcerated parents. I also learned that there has not been any real high quality research on the effect of parental incarceration due to effects that are in place before incarceration like, domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse and parental mental illness (Christian, 2009).

I am truly curious if there is a likely hood of children becoming incarcerated later in life when a parent was incarcerated in their early years. I am thinking the positive contributions of this research could be identifying those "at risk" children when they are young and providing those children and the families with related services such as counseling, support groups, and enrolling the children in a mentor/mentee program.






Christian, S. (2009) Children of incarcerated parents. National Conference of State Legsilature. March 2009.

EDUC 6163 week 2- Personal Research Journey

As I have mentioned in other posts, the topic I chose to research is inclusion in the preschool classroom.  I am currently a special needs preschool teacher and truly believe that "typical" children and special needs children should be in the same classroom. It is my thought that both types of children would learn from each other.  The typical child would be able to be a positive language model and social model for the children with special needs.  The special needs children would teach the typical children empathy, compassion and patience. 

Through my research this week I found many articles discussing the benefits of inclusion in a preschool classroom.  My biggest challenge was reading all the "scientific" portions of the research.  I am not one to concern myself with numbers and statistics. I am much more of a practitioner and focus on the overall impact of something. I know that is going to be my biggest challenge continuing in the research process.