Research: Bigger, Better, Bolder
The need to measure our impact is more urgent than ever
Brian Kenney Editor-in-Chief -- School Library Journal, 4/1/2006
Let me come clean: for most of my professional life, I was as interested in library research as I was in, well, library theory. I skipped research methodology as a graduate student. As a practitioner, the how-to-do-it-good types of articles always caught my eye. I was impatient, eager to create change, one of the “Just Do It” generation.
Of course research back then was largely focused on how well the library was doing—measured through things like circulation, attendance, and reference transactions—rather than on how well the library was doing in the lives of its users. But today both school and public libraries need to get past the “numbers served” model of McDonald's and look deeper into the impact libraries have on their communities. To survive, we need to prove our value loud and clear, as complex and difficult as that may be.
Fortunately, school librarians are part of a rich research tradition, with scholars like Rutgers' Carol Kuhlthau, whose investigation into the information search process has changed the face of library research (and, hopefully, the way we all think about our researchers). In this issue, we feature an interview with Rutgers' Ross Todd, not because we really think Todd can rescue us, but because his model of evidence-based practice offers a strategy for how school librarians, by gathering evidence of the impact of teaching and learning in their own library, can rescue themselves. And Todd and Kuhlthau's latest research shows how all school libraries can become even better at promoting learning.
But local evidence is just part of the picture. Researcher Keith Curry Lance—whose groundbreaking (and often replicated) Colorado study documents that the amount of school library expenditures, among other measures, is a predictor of academic achievement—also talks about the new level of research school libraries must undertake. The challenge, as Lance sees it, is to create stronger causal evidence of the impact of school libraries on student achievement. “Nothing demonstrates this reality as strongly as the demand for scientifically based research by the U.S. Department of Education,” writes Lance in the pages of School Library Media Research. “We need to make the strongest claims we can based on the impact of school libraries on students' standards-based test scores, because, however limited they may be, results on such tests are the measure of learning enshrined in No Child Left Behind.”
Local evidence. A national research agenda. The question remains: Is anyone listening? Researchers Jenny Robins and Sara Wolf are onto this. The two are trying to establish a Special Interest Group (SIG) for school library research within the American Educational Research Association, sponsor of the premier conference for education research. “There were 8,000 programs at last year's conference,” says Robins, a professor at Central Missouri State University. “And not one was about school libraries. It's like we don't exist. What a missed opportunity!” Their SIG, explains Wolf, a professor at Auburn University, will be a way to get documentation on school libraries and student learning in front of education professors, teachers, and administrators. “We need them to understand we aren't there just to inventory text books. This is that opportunity.” For more on their initiative, visit faculty.cmsu.edu/jrobins/AERA.
If we learn anything from the “65 percent solution” movement, it's that research can't wait. It involves all of us: the professor in the university, the librarian in the media center, our professional organizations, and SLJ. When it comes to research, it's time to just do it.
