Bringing the Library Into the Lab

If we want our students to become independent, motivated learners and high achievers in general and more proficient in the sciences in particular, we must successfully meld together science and information literacy standards. However, the only way to bring the science lab and the media center together is by cultivating better working relationships between science teachers and library media specialists.

In order to begin a professional dialogue, however, they'll need to speak the same language. School librarians and science teachers come from different cultures—they speak different dialects and often have different priorities. But there's more in common between media specialists and science teachers than meets the eye: both want to ensure that their students find and use information responsibly and honestly. And both must deal with today's cut-and-paste generation, ensuring that teenagers become critical thinkers, stressing to students that not all information is credible and when it's appropriate to cite sources.

How do we know librarians and science teachers can form meaningful partnerships? Primarily by the striking similarities that exist between science-teaching standards and information literacy standards. For example, the National Science Education Standards, which define the standards that science teachers must follow, say students must describe, explain, and predict natural phenomena; understand articles about science; debate opposite sides of scientific issues; and evaluate the quality of scientific information. It sounds a lot like what's expected of media specialists—to create information literate students who can access, find, and evaluate information from multiple sources.

Similarities can also be found between physics learning components and information literacy skills. Just like information literacy skills, physics involves scientific investigation, which includes learning-by-doing or practical reasoning. For example, in physics, there is a body of knowledge that requires students to effectively access information from diverse sources, to think critically, and to use information ethically. Likewise, effective information literacy skills require students to access quality sources, locate the right information, and create bibliographies. Both information literacy skills and science standards involve learning-by- applying and putting all the pieces together to present well-thought-out and cohesive theses.

As a way to demonstrate—as well as reinforce—how information literacy and science standards overlap, we asked ninth-grade students to solve an energy transformation problem using their own everyday experiences. They were asked to take a long list of words—such as gasoline, plants, and fossil fuels—and group them together into interrelated concepts. To help students create conceptual maps, we used Inspiration software (www.inspiration.com), which allows users to organize concepts graphically and describe their relationships.

Students identified the four main energy concepts and color-coded them. Types of energy were coded green. Carriers of energy were coded red. Places where energy is transformed were coded blue, and transformation processes were coded yellow. The ovals started to fill with the preassigned terms. Students, for example, identified the types-of-energy oval with terms such as kinetic, potential, chemical, nuclear, heat, and light. Various students worked on different concepts simultaneously.

Armed with some understanding of the basic vocabulary, students went to the lab to answer the question "What happens to the potential energy of a car as it rolls down a ramp?" Then they moved from the science lab to the library and worked on the question "Where does the kinetic energy of a car come from?" They were asked to trace the energy transformations that ended with discovering the car's kinetic energy. They searched for concepts on nuclear fusion, photosynthesis, and oil and gas by using a variety of resources—everything from print and Web-based encyclopedias to magazines, almanacs, maps, and multimedia physics demos. Students were then introduced to digital primary sources, such as patents and technical reports. Their search for specific patents was fun; and trademarks were used to illustrate inventions. And although technical reports aren't required in high schools, students became familiar with the notion of funding research and the different methods for disseminating new knowledge in the sciences.

Our lesson reinforced how much inquiry-based learning, lab experimentation, class discussion, and library research methods have in common. Our collaboration also made a compelling case for more partnerships between science teachers and library media specialists in grades 7–12. The experience also points to the fact that despite their cultural differences, teachers and librarians share a common interest: student learning.