Here’s some disturbing news from one of my old stomping grounds (Central PA). In an effort to save money and focus more on core courses (read: test scores) the Chambersburg Area School District plans on cutting time spent on several electives, including a library research course.
Chambersburg Area School Board to Consider Cutting Electives (Public Opinion Online)
This has serious implications for student research and information literacy competencies. One issue discussed in many a class in library school is information literacy, and how many of us future librarians and info pros did not come to college with adequate research skills, and instruction (if any) received was scant at best. (My own undergraduate institution offered a two credit course in Information Literacy, but I was not required to take it, being grandfathered under older degree requirements. Those who did take the course called it a “joke” possibly because it was so new and course framework was still being designed and tested.)
The most recent report from Project Information Literacy (a large scale study conducted at the University of Washington) reaffirms these facts – while students use databases for research (good), Google and course reserves are still popular for scholarly work (bad). Additionally, there’s no growth in research skills (very bad), using the same skill sets and resources over and over again, like a security blanket, whether or not they are useful for the research task at hand. (Download report here.)
If students cannot find and use research resources appropriately (without a little help from us librarians), or evaluate resources they find independently (again, without a little help from us librarians), there will be implications for knowledge growth, and our competition in the world marketplace. Google is wonderful, but Google is not one size fits all, much less even one database in a subject areas. (For one, I rely too much on Wilson’s Library Literature Full Text database for work, but am now coming to appreciate Emerald Management Extra and EBSCO’s Library and Information Science Abstracts. The latter totally saved my sanity this week.)
Clearly the problem is not being adequately addressed at the college level, so my classmates and I surmised that the foundation should be built at the high school level, or even younger . (How many of you remember “library time” in elementary or middle school as “get books and story time?”)
Chambersburg is cutting off its nose to spite its face. Here is a school offering library research as a course, a course whose foundations underpin all other courses (including those lauded core classes the school seems to now care about disproportionately), and not time in that course is going to be reduced.
There will be a trickle down effect if this goes through. And I don’t really want to think about it.
Posted by librariankate7578 
