Study: Good School Libraries Affect Test Scores Columbia, SC (WLTX) - A study released Tuesday by the South Carolina Association of School Librarians shows that the more emphasis is put on school libraries--and the learning that takes place there--the better scores students receive on standardized tests. University of South Carolina Professor Dr. Karen Gavigan outlined the studies five areas of importance at a press conference Tuesday morning. "The presence of librarians and library support staff, instructional collaboration between librarians and teachers, traditional and digital collections, library expenditures, and access to computers," she explained. The study found that the schools which had these five components had better performance on the Palmetto Assessment of State Standards. One of third-grader Tavetria Amponsah's favorite things to do is to go to the library and read. School Librarian Debbie Cooper says the learning that takes place there is guided by collaboration between her and the teachers, but driven by the students.
Why are school libraries essential? (Video courtesy of the New Jersey Association of School Librarians) Student Achievement More than 60 education and library research studies have produced clear evidence that school library programs staffed by qualified school librarians have a positive impact on student academic achievement. Read more. College and Career Readiness Today’s K–12 students will compete for jobs in a global economy. Lifelong Learners Imagine a place where all students feel welcome and encouraged to grow and learn. Fighting fake news by teaching neuroscience & social psychology (2020) Guest blog: Dr Graham Gardner, Librarian, Abingdon School Introduction From claims over the size of the crowd at Donald Trump’s inauguration to automated “bots” retweeting disinformation generated in the “fake news” factories of Macedonia, the spread of disinformation, misinformation and outright falsehoods had become integral to contemporary life. While “alternative facts” are in the ascendant, our collective capacity to shoot them down is sadly lacking. In the US, landmark studies in 2016 and 2019 suggest that the vast majority of citizens can’t separate “fake news” from “real”, or distinguish between straight journalism, advertising and political ads. Resistance to information literacy education The rationale for an intense focus on “information literacy” couldn’t be clearer. Source: Many students unfortunately, might beg to differ. They didn’t dispute the problem of fake news. It was a dilemma. What to do? From research to practise The solutions:
The Results Are In: Libraries Matter. — Room to Read Insider At Room to Read we are passionate about testing our assumptions. We do not want to take for granted that what we’re doing is valuable and effective, we want to be able to prove it and improve it. When it comes to our school libraries, it can be easily supposed that our libraries are enhancing children’s reading habits, but we wanted to test this assumption and find out more. Does having a library help make a child more likely to read for pleasure at school? And what about at home? Measuring the impact of thousands of libraries across multiple countries is quite a formidable undertaking, but with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, we commissioned an independent, external research team to examine our libraries in Laos, Nepal, India, Sri Lanka, Zambia, and South Africa. Across all six countries, the evaluator visited more than 2,400 schools and interviewed more than 20,000 children. The study revealed more nuanced insights as well.
S.O.S. for Information Literacy The Challenge That's Bigger Than Fake News (2017) Since the November 2016 presidential election, coverage of “fake news” has been everywhere. It’s hard to turn on the TV without hearing the term. Google and Facebook have pitched plans for fighting the menace.1 State legislators have even introduced bills to mandate K–12 instruction on the topic.2 Fake news is certainly a problem. Sadly, however, it’s not our biggest. Fact-checking organizations like Snopes and PolitiFact can help us detect canards invented by enterprising Macedonian teenagers,3 but the Internet is filled with content that defies labels like “fake” or “real.” For every social issue, there are websites that blast half-true headlines, manipulate data, and advance partisan agendas. The Internet dominates young people’s lives. Unfortunately, our research at the Stanford History Education Group demonstrates they don’t.* Between January 2015 and June 2016, we administered 56 tasks to students across 12 states. Assessments of Civic Online Reasoning Who’s Behind the Information?
The importance of school libraries in the Google Age Kay Oddone In Australia, access to the internet is almost ubiquitous. In 2014–15, 85% of the Australian population aged 15 years and over were internet users, with 99% of people aged 15–17 using the internet (ABS 2016). Regular newspaper articles spread the gloomy news about the demise of the teacher librarian; articles such as 'Teacher librarians on borrowed time' in The Age (Preiss 2014) speak of funding pressures in Australian schools — but this is not just a local phenomenon. Fortunately, in Australia almost all schools still have a library — and thanks to the Building the Education Revolution funding which prioritised school libraries in primary schools (Gillard 2009), many are quite new. The situation is dire, but the battle is not over yet. There are multiple reasons why schools must retain the teacher librarian role; and why, despite easy access to Google, this role is more important than ever. Scholastic's publication 'School Libraries Work!' How can a school exist without one?
School Libraries Fight Fake News Fake news has been all over the real news lately. From Mark Zuckerburg to Pizzagate, fake news is a huge problem, and it’s not going away on its own. According to a recent study from Stanford University, approximately 80 percent of students struggled to evaluate the credibility of an online resource. This is a little disheartening, since this is a huge part of what we teach as school librarians, and it appears we’ve not been very effective. There really isn’t a magic formula or checklist that replaces the critical thinking needed to determine if information is credible. Based on the recent surge of fake news and the results of the Stanford study, we decided to overhaul our website evaluation lessons by doing the following: Changing website evaluation to resource evaluation. Fake news has always been around, but now it feels more threatening. Completed worksheet from the Stanford study Author: Mica Johnson I’m a school librarian at Farragut Middle. Like this: Like Loading...