Maybe I'm doing this out of order...

I started looking up articles for my research topic before fully spelling out what my topic is going to be.  Ideally I would like to do research on baby sign language as it is used in lapsit and other storytimes geared toward infants but I was having a difficult time finding articles on that specific a topic.  I expanded my search to look at articles about baby sign language in general and about lapsit programs.  I checked out a book from the library today, Dancing With Words: Signing for Hearing Children's Literacy by Marilyn Daniels, which I hope to skim and that it will also help me find articles about the impact of baby sign language upon literacy of children, which I guess would be the goal I would hope baby sign language in lapsit programs would also help to attain.

Chapter 5 in our class textbook discussed fixed design experiments, and I don't think that would work very well for the research I would hope to do.  In my mind, my research experiment involves teaching baby sign language in a lapsit program and observing the babies afterward to see if and how long it takes them to pick up the signs.  I wonder if this would be a very faulty experiment though, because there would be a lot of variables I couldn't control, such as how often the parent works on baby sign language at home with the child.  But perhaps, if it were a long term study, one could observe if there were any possible connections with literacy down the line.  I wonder if my topic is still too broad, or if I am over analyzing potential validity threats to my research study.  Perhaps something like a survey asking parents if their children use signs, and if so, which ones, could lead to knowing which signs are most effective for babies and thus let libraries know which signs to teach first.  I guess there is always time for more research!