Child Key Issue = is daycare beneficial for child development?
In the UK a high percentage of mothers return to work after having a child. This is being encouraged as the focus has been on daycare being beneficial for increasing a child’s socialbility though the opportunity to play with others and to boost their cognitive development with greater opportunities for development and help with literacy and numeracy. However daycare is highly expensive and there is the debate over whether it does benefit development. Others argue that daycare leads to behavioural problems. This is an issue to society as parents want to make the best decisions for their child.
Practical
Note: This is only an example, exam questions may differ to those suggested below
Aim: to conduct a content analysis of 2 newspaper articles, one from the Metro and one from the Guardian to compare whether daycare is beneficial for social and cognitive development
Gathering: As a class we went onto the internet and used Google to search ‘daycare’. We all printed out the articles we found and discussed the source and date of the articles. We decided to get rid of articles that were not from the UK as we believed these would not be useful applied to the UK daycare system. We also checked the age of the articles and the paper they came from. We decided on the Guardian as we feel it is a trustworthy source. We also chose one from the Metro which would have been accessible to many people.
Data Analysis: Before reading the articles we created a list of categories for our content analysis. These were all related to the aim and included: social, cognitive, age, behaviour. We decided to tally positive and negative examples from each article separately. We also tallied each category for the articles separately for comparisons to be made between the 2. Once we had analysed this we then looked at the research from EPPE, NICHD, Belsky & Rovine and Andersson to see how this could apply.
Findings: Our analysis found more positive comments in the Guardian than in the Metro. The Guardian also had no negatives. The tallies added up to 8 positive in the Guardian and 7 positive in the Metro. For the Metro we recorded 8 negatives.
Application: These findings are supported by the EPPE study. Both articles had positive points on cognitive development. Slyva’s EPPE study found that daycare lead to improved SATs results in literacy and numeracy. It was also disadvantaged children that benefitted most from daycare. NICHD also supports this as the findings were that nursery style daycare improved cognitive and social development. NICHD also supports the negative findings from the Metro as NICHD found that although cognitive development was increased by attending nursery style daycare, behavioural problems were also higher and that children who spent longer in daycare had more behavioural issues. These studies and articles therefore suggest that there are a number of factors involved in the benefits of daycare.
In the UK a high percentage of mothers return to work after having a child. This is being encouraged as the focus has been on daycare being beneficial for increasing a child’s socialbility though the opportunity to play with others and to boost their cognitive development with greater opportunities for development and help with literacy and numeracy. However daycare is highly expensive and there is the debate over whether it does benefit development. Others argue that daycare leads to behavioural problems. This is an issue to society as parents want to make the best decisions for their child.
Practical
Note: This is only an example, exam questions may differ to those suggested below
Aim: to conduct a content analysis of 2 newspaper articles, one from the Metro and one from the Guardian to compare whether daycare is beneficial for social and cognitive development
Gathering: As a class we went onto the internet and used Google to search ‘daycare’. We all printed out the articles we found and discussed the source and date of the articles. We decided to get rid of articles that were not from the UK as we believed these would not be useful applied to the UK daycare system. We also checked the age of the articles and the paper they came from. We decided on the Guardian as we feel it is a trustworthy source. We also chose one from the Metro which would have been accessible to many people.
Data Analysis: Before reading the articles we created a list of categories for our content analysis. These were all related to the aim and included: social, cognitive, age, behaviour. We decided to tally positive and negative examples from each article separately. We also tallied each category for the articles separately for comparisons to be made between the 2. Once we had analysed this we then looked at the research from EPPE, NICHD, Belsky & Rovine and Andersson to see how this could apply.
Findings: Our analysis found more positive comments in the Guardian than in the Metro. The Guardian also had no negatives. The tallies added up to 8 positive in the Guardian and 7 positive in the Metro. For the Metro we recorded 8 negatives.
Application: These findings are supported by the EPPE study. Both articles had positive points on cognitive development. Slyva’s EPPE study found that daycare lead to improved SATs results in literacy and numeracy. It was also disadvantaged children that benefitted most from daycare. NICHD also supports this as the findings were that nursery style daycare improved cognitive and social development. NICHD also supports the negative findings from the Metro as NICHD found that although cognitive development was increased by attending nursery style daycare, behavioural problems were also higher and that children who spent longer in daycare had more behavioural issues. These studies and articles therefore suggest that there are a number of factors involved in the benefits of daycare.