Several years ago, some of our LuCiD researchers had some sixth-form students (Mia, Emily, Sheila, and Cathryn) come to work at the University of Manchester Child Study Centre. These students were part of the Nuffield Research Placement Scheme, and they joined the lab for four weeks for a taste of language development research! We’ve just published our research study and thought it would be nice to catch up with some of them to see what they’re up to now!
When the students joined us, our goal was come up with a new study to see what children think words like bigger, smaller, and taller actually mean. We wondered when children knew what these words meant and if that changed across development. We set our new researchers up with some scientific papers to read to get started, along with a general idea of our question, and a room full of toys to design a research study to answer our question. In the end, we settled on a completely new type of study where one research would build something out of blocks and we would ask children to build something that was, for example, bigger than what the research built. This let us see what children think these words actually mean. We then teamed up with the Manchester Museum, who let us set up a station to try our study with children in museum. After a week of testing, our students gained some experience with analysing the data to find the answer to our question!
In a whirlwind month, they learned how to read scientific papers, design a completely new research study, collect data with kids, and analyse the data, and write up a research report! If you’d like to see what we found, you can read our research blog here (link)!
It’s been a few years since the programme (and it took a few more rounds of school holidays in the museum to collect all of the data!) and we caught up with the summer researchers to see what they’re up to now. They all found the Nuffield Research Placements Scheme to be an excellent opportunity that helped them develop skills that they have built on in their education. Two of our students went on to study in Manchester; Sheila with our colleagues in Audiology and Emily went off to Nursing. The other two students found Psychology so exciting that they decided to study that specifically- with Mia recently graduating from Leeds and Cathryn from Lancaster (where she even worked with some of our Lancaster LuCiD team)!
All of them found the research experience gave them a boost in doing literature reviews, research projects, and dissertations in their degree programmes. Shelia told us that the experience working with children (and the wider public in the museum) boosted her confidence in interacting with different populations and helped her in working with paediatric patients in her Audiology placement. Mia found working with children so exciting that she’s been working as a special education needs tutor and a maths teacher and has her sights on doing educational psychology research in a PhD. Cathryn told us that the placement sparked her passion in psychology and she’s now taking that passion into the community, working at her local council on both staff wellbeing projects and working with young people as part of their Employment Pathways team!
Looking back, they all found that the Nuffield Research Placement in the Child Study Centre gave them insight into the kinds of research that is done at university, gave them experience in working with children and with psychology, and helped them think about how research can shed light even on complicated topics, like how children learn language! We were lucky to be able to work with such enthusiastic young researchers to help us design and run a new research study.
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