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The contribution of England's primary school libraries to the development of students' information literacy

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thesis
posted on 2017-02-08, 11:45 authored by Kristin C. Meredith Galley
This study sets out to determine whether or not a primary school library, managed by a school librarian, makes a contribution to the information literacy development of year 6 students (ages 10-11 years old). The methodological approach to this research was interpretivist, ethnographic case studies. This is a shift from other studies on school library impact because it employs direct observation of students, and studies each school as a whole, where prior studies have relied on assessment data. This study relied on data collected in the natural environment where children were working to develop rich descriptions of the schools chosen, to be written into detailed case studies. In order to determine the contribution of the school library to information literacy development, the researcher spent time in three different schools, which had differing levels of library provision. The researcher spent time with a Year 6 (age 10-11 years) class in each school, and observed their information behaviour during a research task assigned by their classroom teacher. In order to streamline the observations, an observation framework was developed. This also ensured that each class in the three schools was observed in the same way. The researcher was immersed in each class for the duration of the class assignment, and walked around during the research lessons and spoke to the children about their research process. Semi structured interviews were conducted with members of teaching staff and head teachers to gain information about the school, and to determine their attitudes about school library provision, employing a librarian and the instruction of information literacy. Each school was then written into a case study to provide a rich picture of the school, and of the specific events during the observation sessions with the students. From the case studies, themes about the ways that the students experienced information emerged, and the findings from each school was the basis for the creation of an information literacy framework and recommendations of best practice found in each of the three schools. The investigation highlighted the important contribution that a well-managed school library made to the development of students information literacy.

Funding

Loughborough University, Graduate School.

History

School

  • Science

Department

  • Information Science

Publisher

© Kristin Clancy Meredith Galley

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2017

Notes

A Doctoral Thesis. Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy of Loughborough University.

Language

  • en