Blog 5b: Science Fair Proposal

1. What is your topic?

Child Care

2. What is the driving problem behind your experiment and the quote by an expert to support that problem? (Expert citation must be MLA format.)

Problem: Lack of quality providers in daycares.
"Her travails began with a well-regarded day care center near her suburban New Jersey home. On the surface, it was great. One staff member for every three babies, a sensitive administrator, clean facilities. "But when I went in," Frank recalls, "I saw this line of cribs and all these babies with their arms out crying, wanting to be picked up. I felt like crying myself." She walked out without signing Isaac up and went through a succession of other unsatisfactory situations -- a babysitter who couldn't speak English, a woman who cared for 10 children in her home at once -- before settling on a neighborhood woman who took Isaac into her home. "She was fabulous," Frank recalls wistfully. Three weeks after that babysitter started, she got sick and had to quit."
Quote from: 
Zinsmeister, Karl. "The Problem with Daycare." Thelizlibrary.org. The American Expertise, May-June 1998. Web. 8 Nov. 2012.

3. What is your hypothesis? (Must be in If-Then form.)

If the amount of experience a child care provider has is higher, then the likelihood of the child being more stable at home is higher.

4. Write a paragraph summary of how you will perform the experiment.  Include the tools you plan on using.

In order to do this experiment, I will need to have a survey asking child care providers to answer a few questions regarding the amount of years they have worked under the child care field and the kind of experience they have. I would have another survey that would measure the stability of the child at home, I will use a survey already created by other scientists in order to help me on this part. Another survey would be used to find out the satisfaction of the parents upon sending their child to that daycare.

5. Select one of the following Project Categories for your experiment:

Behavioral/Social Science

S.F. Blog 5A: Problem Statement

(1) Topic: Child Care

(2) Problems in your topic and what you will do once they are solved.

• A problem which is often seen and that was even mentioned to me by my first interviewee was the fact that it is hard to find a person who will take good care of a child. Lots of times the children can be abused or ignored when taken to a daycare or a babysitter, and that is not good for the child.  It would be really hard to find a solution for this, since it is in such a wide spectrum and depends on each person. It seems the most efficient way to overcome this problem would be to have certain criteria, which I'm sure there already are, on who can take care of a child responsibly.
• Bad facilities also seems to be a big problem. There was an article that I read on MSN saying that day cares contribute to behavioral problems in children. Sometimes there are also inadequate restrooms and playgrounds for the children to use. 

Both of these problems seem hard to solve for the science fair, but perhaps there is an easier way to go about it that I am not aware of. So I need to find a mentor soon and speak to them more closely about it and that will also help me find out what I will do once the problems are solved.