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Look it up: High-quality school library programs lead to better achievement
When Deborah Sneddon, a librarian at Cherry Creek High School in Greenwood Village, Colo., ran into one of her students bagging groceries at a local supermarket recently, she could hardly believe her ears. "Ms. Sneddon, Ms. Sneddon," Brandon said excitedly. "You'll never guess what happened—Bobby Seale called me!"
Sneddon was shocked. When she had suggested the student eMail Bobby Seale—founder of the highly political 1960s protest organization known as the Black Panther Party—as part of a school project on civil rights, she hardly expected Seale to call. But he had.
According to the student, he and Seale talked for more than two hours about Seale's role in the controversial political movement.
To Sneddon, the call was just one in a long list of examples of how librarians at Cherry Creek—winner of the American Library Association's award for best single school library in 2003are using information literacy to help bring school projects to life.
"You really need to break that stereotype of librarians whose job it is to dust off the books and keep you quiet," she said.
At the foundation of this nationally recognized program are a core group of librarians who also happen to be certified teachers. Dawn Vaughn, administrative assistant and library coordinator for Cherry Creek High School, has dubbed her school's program a "teaching library," because all four of the center's full-time media specialists were once classroom teachers.
Drawing from past experiences, Cherry Creek's librarians work collaboratively with instructors to design lessons that not only make the most of the center's rich information resources, but also intertwine with the curriculum to make the library a natural extension of the classroom.
The idea is to design lessons that are creative and require students to think critically about their research—lessons that go beyond finding the information and putting it down on paper.
"We collaboratively plan the lesson so that information literacy is infused throughout," Vaughn said.
Judging by the numbers, it appears the school's efforts are paying off. At a White House Conference on School Libraries earlier this year, Cherry Creek Principal Kathleen Smith said that in the past 10 years this school of 3,500 students has increased its graduation rate by 5 percent, to 96 percent of students, while decreasing its dropout rate to less than one percent of students. Ninety-percent of the school's graduates go on to college, and there has been a 400-percent increase in the number of students taking Advanced Placement tests—with 93 percent of these students receiving a 3 (a passing score) or higher on the exams.
When it comes to improving student achievement, "having a good library is absolutely essential," said Vaughn.
Linking libraries with achievement
Cherry Creek's success mirrors the findings of nearly a dozen statewide studies conducted during the past decade. All reached the same powerful conclusion: High-quality school library programs can have a direct, measurable impact on student achievement.
The architect of many of these studies is Keith Curry Lance, director of the Colorado-based Library Research Service (LRS). In the early 1990s Lance set out to examine the relationship between school libraries and their students' academic success. His inaugural study, called "The Impact of School Library Media Centers on Academic Achievement," looked at the test scores of Colorado schools in conjunction with their library initiatives.
Published in 1993, the study was the first to demonstrate that higher test scores can be linked to increased spending for library media programs that include more and better qualified staff, more time for staff-teacher collaboration, and larger and more diverse collections.
Since that first study, Lance and his research team have examined school libraries in Alaska, Iowa, Oregon, and Pennsylvania, and they've conducted a second study in Colorado. Other researchers have led similar studies in Minnesota, North Carolina, and Texas. All show a direct correlation between the strength of a school's library program and the success of its students (see box at left ).
Lance, whose research on the relationship between good school libraries and student achievement has been emulated nationwide, employed a statistical procedure called regression analysis to prove the correlation.
The idea, he said, was to account for variables that would have skewed the findings and to focus solely on the contribution of libraries.
In his studies, Lance sought to control for several outstanding variables, including per-pupil spending, teacher-pupil ratio, and teacher experience. He followed the same rules when conducting research in the outlying community, controlling for such extenuating circumstances as poverty, the rate and level of adult education, and various racial and ethnic differences.
"We knew there were going to be multiple potential predictors, and this was a way to weigh the impact of those variables," Lance said. He called this process the "major contribution" of his research.
Although there have been several attempts nationwide to replicate his research, Lance said he knows of no studies that refute these findings.
In each study, he said, two common factors emerged that are central to the definition of a successful school library in the 21st century: staffing and resources.
Students in schools with well-equipped library media centers staffed by professional library media specialists perform better on assessments of reading comprehension and basic research skills, the studies found.
No matter where your school is on the spending continuum—whether you spend above or below the national per-pupil average on library resources—increased staffing and access to better resources will improve students' test scores in nearly all cases, Lance said.
Success begins with staffing
The key to a strong school library system begins with a certified librarian and extends to the types of resources, both digital and print, that are available throughout the school.
Topping the list of essential characteristics for a high-quality school library program is the need for certified media specialists, Lance said: "What makes a good school library is a good school librarian."
Librarians, he said, must be thoroughly involved in every aspect of the educational process, from curriculum and instruction to technology planning and design.
Lance's research also shows a direct link between higher reading scores and collaboration between school library media specialists and teachers. This collaboration should include identifying useful materials and information for teachers; planning instruction cooperatively with teachers; providing in-service training to teachers; and teaching students about information literacy, both with classroom teachers and independently.
At Cherry Creek, six full-time library media specialists serve 3,500 students. When teachers bring their classes to the library, they do so in conjunction with work that has been planned with the librarians beforehand. Examples of successful projects and assignments are kept on file, and individual students and teachers often seek out the school's librarians for assistance.
Sneddon pointed to three main aspects of the school's success: First, its librarians are all certified teachers. Second, the librarians are an integral part of both the teaching and planning processes. Third, they are creative in the way they plan lessons. They don't plan activities for the sake of keeping children busy in the library; instead, they plan lessons that effectively teach skills kids can apply to the curriculum and outside of school to real-life situations.
Like at Cherry Creek, the first priority of administrators at Millard Public Schools in Nebraska is to provide students with access to full-time certified information specialists.
"Our staff is our most important resource," said Donna Helvering, information and media department head at Millard, which won ALA's award this year for best library system in a large school district.
Each school at Millard has at least one full-time certified media specialist, and schools with more than 1,000 students have at least two full-time certified specialists on staff, Helvering said.
According to Helvering, the title "information specialist" implies a greater responsibility than that of the traditional librarian. The job of the information specialist extends far beyond the placement and keeping of books on the shelf, she said: "We have really embraced the technology realm to a great degree."
But that doesn't mean information specialists are trained computer technicians, either. Although they are trained to use technology and are responsible for teaching others how to use electronic resources, information specialists are not trouble-shooters. Instead, their role is to concentrate on the integration of the technology into the curriculum.
"Our people are in charge of making sure our children are making good use of the curriculum," Helvering said. "We integrate information literacy into the curriculum."
She added: "We have very defined goals [for] information literacy and technology literacy."
Helvering said district officials measure progress toward these goals through a series of rubrics and assessments designed to judge how effectively information literacy is being integrated into the curriculum. Students, too, are encouraged to consult the rubrics, which provide a basis for teachers' expectations before students embark on technology-centered lessons.
At the end of the day, success always comes back to the ability of the staff. "We couldn't do any of this if we did not have a good staff," Helvering said.
Media specialists in Millard work closely with the district's technology staff, Helvering said, and all of the work done in its school libraries is overseen by the district's curriculum department. That department includes three full-time information and media specialists, who are responsible for ensuring that every student in every school has access to the same media resources.
"We make sure what happens at one school also happens at another," Helvering said. "We don't have pockets of excellence."
The district's media specialists also help ensure that online databases and other information services can be integrated into the curriculum easily. They provide database training so educators and students can glean the most information possible from online reference materials, Helvering said.
"The assignments students receive need to be meaningful," she added. It doesn't do students much good if an instructor sends them to the library to find a particular resource, then doesn't encourage them to do anything with it. Instead, students must be able to find resources, read them, reflect on their meaning, then explain how their findings tie in with real-life scenarios.
Access to modern resources also key
A good school library also must have a rich and varied mix of print and online resources available for students to consult and share. Like certified librarians, online databases and interconnected library systems are critical to achieving a high rate of student success, research shows.
It's not just about making sure information is accessible inside the library itself--it's about pushing these resources out into the entire school and, in many cases, into the home as well. And technology is the key to providing this level of access.
At Cherry Creek, the use of an online card catalog from Sirsi Corp. gives students access to the library's resources from school or from home. From any internet-connected computer, students can browse through more than 15 periodical databases containing everything from general magazine articles to academic research and professional journals.
Vaughn said the library prides itself on providing computer access for its students. The media center even has a "drop-in" lab where students can come at lunch time or even between classes to check their eMail and jump online for educational purposes. The drop-in lab stays open until 5:30 at night, so students without computer access from home have a place to get online and do their homework or conduct after-hours research.
From a teaching standpoint, the library also has two classroom technology labs. One lab is built on a Macintosh platform and contains tools for video and movie production, including Apple's iMovie and Final Cut Pro software; the other operates on a Windows platform and is used for word processing, among other things.
Students use a number of computer-based applications in their classes, from products in the Microsoft Office suite to design elements in Microsoft Publisher and other more advanced web creation tools, such as Macromedia's DreamWeaver.
The goal, Vaughn said, is not necessarily to teach software, but rather to help students learn how the software can be applied to their lessons and, further still, throughout their lives.
Cherry Creek's media center is bustling with activity during the school day. In fact, in a school of nearly 3,550 students, Vaughn said as many as 1,500 students pass through its doors each day.
At the Fort Worth Independent School District in Texas, access to high-quality resources also is important. Fort Worth uses an online catalog from Sagebrush Corp. that students can access from school or home. The idea, said Joan Leach, the district's program director for library media, is to promote a better use of available resources and to push that information beyond the boundaries of the brick-and-mortar school building.
It's important for students to have easy access to materials, Leach said, and that means offering a single access point for all the district's resources. Fort Worth's online catalog provides that entrée for students.
"Students need to have access to information in the easiest way possible," echoed Karen Mortensen from Sagebrush. "We want to provide easy access to these resources."
Schools across the country make a number of print and online resources available through their libraries, but research shows that students tend to rely only on the simplest access points, such as a search--engine query or cursory keyword search.
"Students are not taking advantage of some of the more robust resources," Mortensen said.
At Sagebrush, as at other library--technology companies, the goal is to create what Mortensen called a "one-stop shop" for media resources, where everything from magazines to multimedia are available from a single access point. The more accessible these resources are, the more likely students will be to integrate them into their projects, she said.
Beyond books
There's no question the usefulness of the 21st-century school library goes far beyond the books on its shelves. From easy access to a wealth of print and online resources, to a highly qualified staff who can help teachers integrate these resources into their instruction, today's school libraries require a new set of tools to propel students to greater achievement.
"Our job is to teach kids how to think and to make good decisions," said Vaughn. "[Students] need to learn to use this information correctly."
In fact, given the proven correlation between library programs and student achievement, how well schools do that in this era of increased accountability could go a long way toward defining their own success.
See these related links:
Cherry Creek High School
Millard Public Schools
Fort Worth Independent School District
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