Expanding Resources

After reviewing several different websites that cater to the early childhood education field, I found reasoning to continue a further study of the NIEER website. NIEER is an acronym for the National Institute for Early Education Research. The website located at http://nieer.org is full of current research in the early childhood education field. My reason for choosing this website is twofold. First, our county Pre-K has recently switched their Pre-K child assessment tool from Teaching Strategies GOLD (which is an online assessment interlaced with the Creative Curriculum), to an assessment authored by NIEER. I am unfamiliar with the new assessment, but as I review it, I find  parts of it to be irrelevant and I felt that certain factors that should be assessed were left out (such as fine motor skills). So, I felt that a review of their site may give me some explanation or reasoning for these issues I am seeing. The second reason I chose NIEER is because of the access to current information and research on early childhood education. I signed up for a free newsletter and I also requested a complimentary copy of their featured publication which is a video called Growing and Learning in Preschool. The description of the video depicts an importance of play in early childhood education as well as specifics that signify high quality in a program. Having access to current research on early childhood education can only further my knowledge of my field, making me a better resource for my colleagues and the families with which I work.