1. Your article must be found in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Examples of scientific journals where you might find research on children under 3 years of age include Child Development, Infancy, Infant Behavior and Development and Infant Mental Health Journal. Do not use an article from a magazine.
2. The article must report on research conducted on children under the age of 3 years old. Otherwise, there are relatively few limits; choose a topic that is interesting to you. There is likely a lot of research available on that topic.
3. Your article should not be a “literature review,” which is basically already a summary of several articles on one topic. How do you know that your article is a research article? It will have the following parts:
a. Objective(s) of study: Briefly state the study/research question(s), which is what the study was trying to determine.
b. Methods
i. Participants (Subjects): Describe who was being studied and the number of participants in the study; including their average (or mean) age and the age range (youngest and oldest), socioeconomic level (if mentioned), and break down of race and/or ethnicity (% White, % Black, % Hispanic, % Asian, % Other).
ii. Assessments/Tests/Instruments: Briefly describe the study design, assessments or tests used to measure changes in the children and/or what interventions (treatments), if any, were used. Mention if the study included a control group.
c. Results: What did the researchers learn? You can obtain this from the Discussion section of the paper.