LBSU 302 - Week 3 Assignment 2 Blog Post

The book I selected in my search from the assignment this week is called GACE: Early Childhood Special Education 004 by Sharon A. Wynne. It’s actually a book designed to help you study for exam to become certified as a special education teacher. Since my topic is based on assessing children with special needs, this book really goes into a lot of detail about what to look for and how to compare a child with special needs to one who doesn’t. It also explains how certain assessments are used and the different kinds of assessment and when and how to use them. This book has a lot of useful objectives and skill sets to help you learn all there is to know about working in special education.

Using the advanced search was a helpful strategy in finding my book. Compared to using the basic standard search method, the advanced search really helps you narrow down the information to specifically what you are looking for. I found the more keywords I used, the better my results were. I also narrowed down a time frame to when books were published, and surprisingly I was more satisfied with my findings. I have never used that feature before, but I will for sure use it more in future research. I saw the tutorial on how to look for e-books and I thought it was very helpful, so I didn’t come across much difficulty when conducting the search. I hope to learn more on how to communicate with parents when dealing with these topics and introducing the idea of assessment and early intervention to parents who are not so accustomed to special education.

LBSU-302 Week 2: Assignment 2

The topic I have been researching for this assignment is “Early Intervention and

Assessment” as it pertains to early childhood education and working with children with special

needs, and how to assess and progress in an effective way that benefits a child’s development and growth. I gained new knowledge about my topic from the research I conducted in that I learned exactly what early intervention is, how it started, how it works, who qualifies for it, and about public resources of early intervention programs. I also gained new knowledge through a lot of informative research that my sources provided. Such as studies and results and statistics about children who were in early intervention programs versus those who weren’t. In addition, there were a lot of graphs and charts that helped me learn visually about the early ages and stages and statistics of children with special needs.

            This assignment really helped me obtain new research skills in locating credible sources. I never really knew about Google’s advanced search. This assignment taught me how to narrow down my research to .edu,.com,.org, and .gov domains when looking for specific sources. Also, I’m not too familiar with how to use the library resources online, and how to search for e-books, so I’m glad this assignment had us use the Chapman University Leatherby Library to research on our topics. Overall, this assignment helped me improve all my research skills and also learn new ones. Using these new skills, another aspect of my topic I would like to research is what signs to looks for in a child who may need assessment, and also the process of how a child gets assessed.

LBSU 302- Assignment 2: Blog Post

My name is Megan Tolentino and this will be my very first session attending Brandman University. I'm going for my Bachelor's in Early Childhood Education. Currently, I am teaching preschool and I work with children who are age’s four to five. I've known I wanted to work with children since taking an ROP class in high school called Careers with Children. We had an on campus preschool, and I've loved working with young children ever since. Obtaining my Bachelor's will help me reach my goal in becoming a Preschool Director or Site Supervisor, which is my current career aspiration.

            Throughout my career, I've had quite a few children who have special needs, whether it be being diagnosed with Autism, or a processing disorder, or something of that sort. So an aspect that I would be interested in researching is how effective early intervention and assessment is pertaining to children with special needs and what the most effective way to go about it is. There are certain "red flags" that teachers need to be aware of, especially dealing with children under five years old, yet I don't think enough teachers are thoroughly educated on what to look for specifically to help children and their individual needs.

The research skills I would like to hone on is definitely being able to know which information I find is legitimate and credible versus the information that is unreliable and ineffective. Also, with that information I find, I would like to be able to cite those sources correctly. Therefore, citing sources would be another research skill I would like to improve. I am looking forward to this session and gaining the skills I need to help me throughout my academic career.