I have noticed a decrease in funding for school libraries over the last couple of years and was curious to see the impact. I'm starting to look at any data I can get my hands on - if you have facts or opinions (please back them up with facts) I would love to dialog over twitter: @ianmct I Like To ReadEQAO provides a survey every year and one of the questions for the elementary schools is: I like to read most of the time - yes/no. I've graphed the results for the last four years (the question does not appear to be asked before then) and these are the results. Grade 3 results look to be fairly consistent - the scale makes 2013/2014 look like a bigger dip than it is - I'm not sure if a decrease of 2.5% would be statistically significant. I am concerned with the drop by grade 6 - 7% decrease is fairly large and more importantly the trend is decreasing. The trend concerns me because it matches the decrease in teacher-librarians over that same period. There are a number of research studies showing the impact that school teacher-librarians have on student achievement (you can access some of them here). The fact that less students like to read is reflected in our reading results - for 2015-2016 17 schools had 75% or more of their students performing at level 4 or above. 2013-2014 it was 23 schools. Next StepsIt would be simplistic to stop here. I will be revisiting this topic and looking at different data. At the end of the day there are no easy answers but as a teacher-librarian I feel it is my duty to start a conversation on this issue. What are we doing to ensure our students love to read? Talk to me - @ianmct |
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