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Impact of school librarians on elementary student achievement in reading and mathematics

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An initial interpretation of the U.S. Department of Education’s AI report: Implications and recommendations for academic libraries

Leo Lo | University of New Mexico

Lois Wine, Shana Pribesh and Sue Kimmel suggest that students in schools with full-time certified librarians do better on arithmetic and reading examinations than their peers.

Image courtesy of interviewee. March 26, 2024

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This video discusses the critical role of certified school librarians in enhancing student achievement and the challenges faced in demonstrating their impact. It highlights that many schools lack certified librarians, often having only volunteers or parents, leading to concerns about the effectiveness of library services. The speaker and their colleague, both school librarians, have conducted research to provide strong evidence of the benefits that certified librarians bring, especially in supporting students' research skills and collaborating with teachers across curriculum requirements.

The conversation emphasizes the decline in school librarian positions, particularly during budget cuts, and the need for advocacy supported by robust evidence to retain these roles. Existing studies indicate a correlation between the presence of trained librarians and higher student performance in subjects like math and language arts, but the speaker asserts the need for more rigorous experimental research to control for various influencing factors.

They outline a quasi-experimental study conducted in North Carolina, comparing student achievement scores between those in schools with certified librarians and those in schools without. The results reveal that students in schools with librarians perform better academically. Despite this, the speaker notes that more research is needed to uncover the specific reasons for these positive outcomes. The concluding remarks stress the importance of school librarians for student learning and call for further investigation into their multifaceted contributions to education.

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Across the country.

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Some schools don't have that certified li librarians.

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There's some only have parents coming in,

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and librarian is covering

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much more than just checkout of fourth Henry attorney.

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Their graduate students have, they had

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go through a lot of training to be a a,

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a school librarian,

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and they're working with the whole school

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as a edu educators too.

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They're collabor.

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Um, we're working with all the teachers

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across all the different requirements for all the classes.

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Um, they help with student to how to be,

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I inquiry, ready for research.

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And they, what the teach the school librarians

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work across, all of that.

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And if you don't have, somebody that knows how

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to pick the box, keep, someone who knows how

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to purchase the right books that don't work

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with with the school, every school is special.

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They're all have different things.

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And you need to have

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what the school kids are wanting to read.

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And the nonfiction that goes with the,

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This was Lois's dissertation.

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Lois and I, are both, or we're both school librarians.

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And so we have, I think, a passion for school librarianship.

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But we also have seen, you know, over the decades

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that school library positions are often at risk.

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Uh, you know, whenever there are budgetary cuts,

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they tend to be sort of, we have to defend these positions

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and advocate for them.

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And, you know, in that we need, you know,

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in convincing administrators

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and, legislators that they should fund,

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school libraries and school librarian positions.

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We need strong evidence.

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And so this study really seeks to provide that a, a,

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a stronger level of evidence than we've had so far.

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And I'm gonna talk some more later, you know, about the body

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of evidence that we already had that this adds to.

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But this, study used a particularly,

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a quasi experimental method, which wa is lacking,

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so far in, in, in the evidence that we had to provide.

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Um, and also I think we've seen, you know,

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we've just kinda seen that's what,

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what's now being called a slide, a loss

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of school library positions.

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So there's been a recent study by, Deb Cashel

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and Keith Curry, Lance that, looked at the loss

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of school library positions over a decade between 2009

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and two and 2019, about 20% nationally,

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loss of those positions.

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And so that's sort of raised a question for us

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as well in terms of why, you know,

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'cause we see these positions as really critical

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to student learning.

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Um, and why, why are we losing?

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And I think there are a lot of reasons why we are

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losing those positions.

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I think it's complex, but again, part of it may be that lack

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of, of persuasive evidence for those who are not,

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in the field with us as school librarians, we have a,

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we're actually a really large body of correlational studies.

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Um, a lot of them have been conducted by Keith Curry, Lance,

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we, we know them as the state studies

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because I think there are,

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23, 23 studies in 23 different states,

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that examined the impact

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of school librarians on student achievement.

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Um, the correlation between school, between schools

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that had a certified school librarian

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and those that didn't, rather,

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that had a school certified school librarian,

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and student achievement in, in,

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in language arts and in math.

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So across the board in those areas.

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So we have a really strong robust, I think, correlate,

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you know, body of correlational work,

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but it doesn't explain, you know, some, some

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of the other variables that might be impacting, that,

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that, that that student achievement.

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And so, and, and more experimental

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or quasi experimental design attempts to kind of,

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to address those areas

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and to really kind of, again, sort of refine,

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our argument that school librarians count in terms

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of student test scores.

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It's really hard when you're the school librarian to connect

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what you do to individual student test scores

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because the school librarian serves

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everybody in the building.

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Every student works with every teacher works

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with the principal, works with families and community.

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And so kind of finding that, that point of, you know,

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where we actually make a difference

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in student test scores has been difficult to demonstrate.

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You know, you made the point of attainment

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and achievement being what we're, you know, a lot of

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what we're ultimately concerned with.

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And so how to draw, that connection

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between a certified school librarian

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and student achievement has been challenging for the field.

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This is Lois's dissertation.

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And, and Lois, you know, found the brothen,

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brothen homer, connection.

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That idea that,

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and the saying also both are looking at schools as systems

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and, as having micro meso

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and macro systems that are embedded in each other

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that intersect with each other, interact with each other.

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Um, and so, for example, a classroom is a micro system

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and a school library is a micro system.

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They exist in a school.

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So that would be more at a meso level.

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The school generally exists in a, a school division

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or a system, you know, et cetera, and a state and so on.

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Um, but within the school, just kind

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of focused in there within the school.

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Um, individuals, individual interact with different systems.

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So student may be in a classroom,

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but a student also may, does things in the library.

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So these systems interact with each other.

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Again, it's what makes it kind of hard to tease out.

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I think, you know, what is the impact of a, of a teacher,

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even as what, and even more so of the school librarians

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'cause the, the, the teachers

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and the students may interact with the school librarians.

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So these systems overlap. They're embedded in each other.

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They, may overlap, with each other.

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And I think that's kind of allows us

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to say yes in that system.

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Um, you know, the school librarian clearly is gonna have

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some impact on the classroom, on the classroom teacher,

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on the students, but I think it also points to some

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of the complexity in trying to tease that out,

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what that impact is.

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But individuals will, you know,

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and an individual student may have a different

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experience in a school library.

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Different individual students may, come in

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as individuals come in, in a small group, come in

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as a whole class, may,

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participate in something in their classroom

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that the teacher collaboratively developed

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with the assistance of the school librarian

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and the resources provided by the school library.

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So there's all these sort of ways, there's, to me,

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it's tangled, tangled up.

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These systems are tangled up, in each other.

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Um, but then, but they also pull on each other, right?

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And are connected to each other in

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that entanglement, if that makes sense. Up

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To that point, we've been able to say students

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who have a librarian in their school certified compared

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to students who don't.

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But we weren't able to control for any other factors

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that influence student achievement.

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And we know that how you did in the past influences

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how you're going to do in the future.

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So previous test scores,

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but we also know things like age, gender, ethnicity,

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poverty status is the, probably the number two factor.

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The environment of the school district,

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whether English language learner, we,

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we isolate the nine most important variables for

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impacting student achievement

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and realize the body of research that we've been relying on.

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To answer the question, do librarians matter really wasn't

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controlling for other factors

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that influenced student achievement?

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So here's what we did.

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We were able

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to access controlled all the students in North Carolina,

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which is held in a repository in at Duke University.

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And we used a clean room

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so nobody would be identified or released.

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And what we did was created, looked at the students

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who were in a school with a librarian,

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and then we found other students

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who didn't have a librarian who looked exactly like them

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on the nine variables.

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So we used what's called a matching technique

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and why we used a matching technique to find Maria

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1.0 who's in the school with a librarian.

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And we found a Maria 2.0 that's in a school

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with without a librarian matching on nine

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critical variables.

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Why we do this is

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because if we wanted a true experimental design, we would

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randomly assign students to schools

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that either have a librarian or don't have a librarian,

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but we can't do that in the United States.

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So we make up for this methodological, lack

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that we can't just force people to go

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to schools that we choose.

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And so we use a quasi experimental design

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and this matching technique.

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So what we're doing is looking for Maria 1.0

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and matching with Maria 2.0 on nine critical variables.

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And we used a technique called propensity score matching,

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which means the nearest person that we could find

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for Maria 1.0 in our comparison group, that's

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who we named Maria 2.0.

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So we set constraints on it so that they are very close

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to one another and therefore we could compare.

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Now people who look exactly alike except

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for one different factor.

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One group goes to a school

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with a certified school librarian,

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and the other exact matching goes

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to a school without a certified librarian.

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And they will look to see if their student achievement

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scores were different.

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Now, this is taking into account they were the same exact

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in performance the year before.

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So this just has to do, we're holding constant,

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important variables like living in poverty status,

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English language learning, school, district age, gender,

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ethnicity, and previous test scores.

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So the only thing that changes is the librarian.

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And what we found is that students who were in schools

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that have a certified school librarian,

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and this is looking at every fourth grader

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and every fifth grader in North Carolina

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and every test we ran, the students who were in schools

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with a certified school librarian

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did better on math and reading.

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It was stunning. The results were stunning.

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So do school librarians matter? Yes, they do.

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We can speculate what they're doing.

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Um, but our analysis, I don't want us to overreach our

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analysis, say that there is an effect,

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but we can't necessarily boil down to is it

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because they're present, it's another body.

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It's because of their incredible training.

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Is it their support of teachers?

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Is it their support of students?

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Is it all of that to together?

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So I just wanna be clear that our analysis is limited to,

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yes, school librarians make a difference

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on student achievement,

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but our analyses did not, does not encompass the whys.

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That would be something for future research.

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Clearly an implication, is

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that we need school librarians.

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Um, and, you know,

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and I will go to Shauna's, you know,

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to your question too about, you know, the why.

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And I think that's another really important implication

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for us is to tease out the why for future research.

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So, school librarians have a really unique preparation

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because we are prepared as both educators, as teachers,

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and as information specialists, as librarians.

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That's a really potent, combination.

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And so I think that, you know,

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that in itself is, is interesting.

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We also talk about leading from the middle so that we,

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in schools, school librarians, again, not only work directly

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with students, but work with teachers.

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So work collaborating with teachers to design instruction,

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often provide professional development to teachers.

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Um, often have a relationship with the principal

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because that's one of the other people in the building

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who works with the entire school.

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So that relationship and collaboration is also important.

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School librarians often serve on the leadership

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team, in schools.

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And so, you know, we, we have really, again, really

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interesting role in school.

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We see a kid I worked in elementary school, you know,

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comes in in, in kindergarten,

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and I get to work with that child and their family

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and their brothers and sisters and their cousins

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and their best friends,

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you know, up through fifth grade.

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Um, and that's a really interesting relationship.

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And then creating those vertical connections,

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between grade levels too, so that I would work

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with the third grade teachers to understand what,

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what students learned should have learned in second grade

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and where they're headed in fourth and fifth grade,

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because I also saw the whole curriculum.

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So, that kinda leaning from the middle I think is in

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maybe another important, aspect of

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what the school librarian does.

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I will also say, you know, just to kind of go to sort

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of the times that we are in that school, librarians teach

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critical thinking skills, information, literacy skills,

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discerning fact, you know, you can kind of see

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where these become really important, I think,

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skills in a democracy, that we, impart

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to students either through direct instruction

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or through our collaboration, with, with teachers

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and also with parents.

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So, school library brains may often also do school-wide,

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events where they're working with parents, to work

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with their child and work with their students.

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So there's so many of these little things

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and sort of teasing out, you know, which of them again,

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is gonna, is, is it's a wide open, huge area of re

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of research that's needed.

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I think in terms of more studies like lois's

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that use a quasi experimental design,

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but also more qualitative studies that sort of, kind of sort

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of dig into what's happening here.

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What's really happening here with the, with a school,

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with a certified school librarian in a building,

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what's happening and how's that different from a building

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that doesn't have a certified, school librarian.

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You know, we, we were sitting on this question

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of do librarians matter and we had a strong body of research

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and so we tackled that

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and I would encourage other researchers to do the same

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where we know, we know librarians matter.

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Um, and so now moving the why do they matter to,

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and we have a fair amount of research on that.

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But moving it to, designs that take it one step further,

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such a quasi experimental design using matching techniques

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is one way that we could move this forward.

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Yeah, school librarians matter.

Importance of Certified School Librarians

00:00:00 - Across the country. Some schools don't have that certified li librarians. There's some only have parents coming in, and librarian is covering much more than just checkout of fourth Henry attorney. Their graduate students have, they had go through a lot of training to be a a,
00:00:32 - and they're working with the whole school as a edu educators too. They're collabor. we're working with all the teachers across all the different requirements for all the classes. they help with student to how to be, I inquiry, ready for research.
00:01:09 - work across, all of that. And if you don't have, somebody that knows how to pick the box, keep, someone who knows how to purchase the right books that don't work with with the school, every school is special. They're all have different things.
00:01:35 - what the school kids are wanting to read. And the nonfiction that goes with the, This was Lois's dissertation. Lois and I, are both, or we're both school librarians. And so we have, I think, a passion for school librarianship. But we also have seen, you know, over the decades that school library positions are often at risk. you know, whenever there are budgetary cuts, they tend to be sort of, we have to defend these positions
00:02:08 - And, you know, in that we need, you know, in convincing administrators and, legislators that they should fund, school libraries and school librarian positions. We need strong evidence. And so this study really seeks to provide that a, a, a stronger level of evidence than we've had so far. And I'm gonna talk some more later, you know, about the body of evidence that we already had that this adds to. But this, study used a particularly,
00:02:44 - so far in, in, in the evidence that we had to provide. and also I think we've seen, you know, we've just kinda seen that's what, what's now being called a slide, a loss of school library positions. So there's been a recent study by, Deb Cashel and Keith Curry, Lance that, looked at the loss of school library positions over a decade between 2009 and two and 2019, about 20% nationally,

Impact of School Librarians on Student Learning

00:03:15 - And so that's sort of raised a question for us as well in terms of why, you know, 'cause we see these positions as really critical to student learning. and why, why are we losing? And I think there are a lot of reasons why we are losing those positions. I think it's complex, but again, part of it may be that lack of, of persuasive evidence for those who are not, in the field with us as school librarians, we have a, we're actually a really large body of correlational studies.
00:03:51 - we, we know them as the state studies because I think there are, 23, 23 studies in 23 different states, that examined the impact of school librarians on student achievement. the correlation between school, between schools that had a certified school librarian and those that didn't, rather, that had a school certified school librarian, and student achievement in, in,
00:04:23 - So across the board in those areas. So we have a really strong robust, I think, correlate, you know, body of correlational work, but it doesn't explain, you know, some, some of the other variables that might be impacting, that, that, that that student achievement. And so, and, and more experimental or quasi experimental design attempts to kind of, to address those areas
00:04:55 - our argument that school librarians count in terms of student test scores. It's really hard when you're the school librarian to connect what you do to individual student test scores because the school librarian serves everybody in the building. Every student works with every teacher works with the principal, works with families and community. And so kind of finding that, that point of, you know,
00:05:25 - in student test scores has been difficult to demonstrate. You know, you made the point of attainment and achievement being what we're, you know, a lot of what we're ultimately concerned with. And so how to draw, that connection between a certified school librarian and student achievement has been challenging for the field. This is Lois's dissertation. And, and Lois, you know, found the brothen, brothen homer, connection.
00:05:55 - and the saying also both are looking at schools as systems and, as having micro meso and macro systems that are embedded in each other that intersect with each other, interact with each other. and so, for example, a classroom is a micro system and a school library is a micro system. They exist in a school. So that would be more at a meso level. The school generally exists in a, a school division

Interconnected Roles of Students and Librarians

00:06:28 - but within the school, just kind of focused in there within the school. individuals, individual interact with different systems. So student may be in a classroom, but a student also may, does things in the library. So these systems interact with each other. Again, it's what makes it kind of hard to tease out. I think, you know, what is the impact of a, of a teacher, even as what, and even more so of the school librarians 'cause the, the, the teachers
00:06:59 - So these systems overlap. They're embedded in each other. They, may overlap, with each other. And I think that's kind of allows us to say yes in that system. you know, the school librarian clearly is gonna have some impact on the classroom, on the classroom teacher, on the students, but I think it also points to some of the complexity in trying to tease that out, what that impact is. But individuals will, you know,
00:07:30 - experience in a school library. Different individual students may, come in as individuals come in, in a small group, come in as a whole class, may, participate in something in their classroom that the teacher collaboratively developed with the assistance of the school librarian and the resources provided by the school library. So there's all these sort of ways, there's, to me, it's tangled, tangled up. These systems are tangled up, in each other. but then, but they also pull on each other, right?
00:08:01 - that entanglement, if that makes sense. Up To that point, we've been able to say students who have a librarian in their school certified compared to students who don't. But we weren't able to control for any other factors that influence student achievement. And we know that how you did in the past influences how you're going to do in the future. So previous test scores, but we also know things like age, gender, ethnicity,
00:08:36 - The environment of the school district, whether English language learner, we, we isolate the nine most important variables for impacting student achievement and realize the body of research that we've been relying on. To answer the question, do librarians matter really wasn't controlling for other factors that influenced student achievement? So here's what we did.
00:09:04 - to access controlled all the students in North Carolina, which is held in a repository in at Duke University. And we used a clean room so nobody would be identified or released. And what we did was created, looked at the students who were in a school with a librarian, and then we found other students who didn't have a librarian who looked exactly like them on the nine variables.

Matching Techniques in Evaluating Librarian Impact

00:09:37 - and why we used a matching technique to find Maria 1.0 who's in the school with a librarian. And we found a Maria 2.0 that's in a school with without a librarian matching on nine critical variables. Why we do this is because if we wanted a true experimental design, we would randomly assign students to schools that either have a librarian or don't have a librarian,
00:10:10 - So we make up for this methodological, lack that we can't just force people to go to schools that we choose. And so we use a quasi experimental design and this matching technique. So what we're doing is looking for Maria 1.0 and matching with Maria 2.0 on nine critical variables. And we used a technique called propensity score matching, which means the nearest person that we could find
00:10:42 - who we named Maria 2.0. So we set constraints on it so that they are very close to one another and therefore we could compare. Now people who look exactly alike except for one different factor. One group goes to a school with a certified school librarian, and the other exact matching goes
00:11:13 - And they will look to see if their student achievement scores were different. Now, this is taking into account they were the same exact in performance the year before. So this just has to do, we're holding constant, important variables like living in poverty status, English language learning, school, district age, gender, ethnicity, and previous test scores.
00:11:46 - And what we found is that students who were in schools that have a certified school librarian, and this is looking at every fourth grader and every fifth grader in North Carolina and every test we ran, the students who were in schools with a certified school librarian did better on math and reading. It was stunning. The results were stunning.
00:12:18 - We can speculate what they're doing. but our analysis, I don't want us to overreach our analysis, say that there is an effect, but we can't necessarily boil down to is it because they're present, it's another body. It's because of their incredible training. Is it their support of teachers? Is it their support of students?

The Importance of School Librarianship

00:12:47 - So I just wanna be clear that our analysis is limited to, yes, school librarians make a difference on student achievement, but our analyses did not, does not encompass the whys. That would be something for future research. Clearly an implication, is that we need school librarians. and, you know, and I will go to Shauna's, you know, to your question too about, you know, the why.
00:13:20 - for us is to tease out the why for future research. So, school librarians have a really unique preparation because we are prepared as both educators, as teachers, and as information specialists, as librarians. That's a really potent, combination. And so I think that, you know, that in itself is, is interesting. We also talk about leading from the middle so that we,
00:13:52 - with students, but work with teachers. So work collaborating with teachers to design instruction, often provide professional development to teachers. often have a relationship with the principal because that's one of the other people in the building who works with the entire school. So that relationship and collaboration is also important. School librarians often serve on the leadership team, in schools.
00:14:23 - interesting role in school. We see a kid I worked in elementary school, you know, comes in in, in kindergarten, and I get to work with that child and their family and their brothers and sisters and their cousins and their best friends, you know, up through fifth grade. and that's a really interesting relationship. And then creating those vertical connections, between grade levels too, so that I would work with the third grade teachers to understand what,
00:14:53 - and where they're headed in fourth and fifth grade, because I also saw the whole curriculum. So, that kinda leaning from the middle I think is in maybe another important, aspect of what the school librarian does. I will also say, you know, just to kind of go to sort of the times that we are in that school, librarians teach critical thinking skills, information, literacy skills, discerning fact, you know, you can kind of see where these become really important, I think,
00:15:26 - to students either through direct instruction or through our collaboration, with, with teachers and also with parents. So, school library brains may often also do school-wide, events where they're working with parents, to work with their child and work with their students. So there's so many of these little things and sort of teasing out, you know, which of them again, is gonna, is, is it's a wide open, huge area of re

Researching the Impact of School Librarians

00:15:57 - I think in terms of more studies like lois's that use a quasi experimental design, but also more qualitative studies that sort of, kind of sort of dig into what's happening here. What's really happening here with the, with a school, with a certified school librarian in a building, what's happening and how's that different from a building that doesn't have a certified, school librarian. You know, we, we were sitting on this question of do librarians matter and we had a strong body of research
00:16:54 - and I would encourage other researchers to do the same where we know, we know librarians matter. and so now moving the why do they matter to, and we have a fair amount of research on that. But moving it to, designs that take it one step further, such a quasi experimental design using matching techniques is one way that we could move this forward. Yeah, school librarians matter.

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