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A place to get away from it all: 5 ways school libraries support student well-being

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Margaret Kristin Merga, Edith Cowan University

Students in Australia and around the world have experienced significant challenges this year, including the COVID-19 pandemic and natural disasters.

Globally, as many as one in five young people may experience mental-health problems. These can be exacerbated, or even brought on by, stressful life events including economic pressures related to the pandemic.

We know teacher librarians and school libraries play an important role in supporting young people’s reading and broader academic achievement. But school libraries play a more diverse role in students’ lives, among which is to support their well-being.

Here are five ways they do this.

1. They can be safe spaces

Creating a positive, safe and supportive school environment can help schools meet young people’s academic, emotional and social needs.

Whether students are victims of bullying or simply feel like they don’t fit in, school libraries can provide safe spaces in sometimes challenging school environments. In some schools, the library is the only space intentionally created as a refuge for young people.

Both the library as a whole, and spaces in it, can be adapted to be comforting sanctuaries. A quiet space with comfortable furniture can make the library a place to “get away from it all”.

Boy sitting cross legged on round stool in library and reading.
A school library is a quiet sanctuary.
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In recent times the school library has been expected to cater to a growing array of diverse purposes such as sports equipment storage and meeting venues, perhaps challenging its ability to be a safe space. It’s important for schools to ensure, within these demands, students still have a special spot to come to for refuge.

2. They provide resources for well-being

When students are experiencing health and other well-being issues, libraries can have valuable resources to help them understand what they are going through and where to get help. School libraries can also potentially provide valuable health resources to the broader community.



Read more:
Why every teacher needs to know about childhood trauma

Teacher librarians curate resources (and weed out irrelevant ones) to ensure students get current, quality information. Library staff may also work with teachers and school psychologists to ensure the school community is well resourced for meeting young people’s needs.

3. They help build digital health-literacy skills

The World Health Organisation has emphasised the importance of health literacy and its potential to support better individual and community health outcomes.

Young people need these skills to prevent potentially dangerous misconceptions, such as those that have circulated during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a 2017 study, researchers worked with school librarians to improve young people’s digital health-literacy skills. The study showed young people had good digital literacy skills when it came to searching for general information. But they had poor knowledge when it came to evaluating the credibility of websites and health information.



Read more:
Teach questions, not answers: science literacy is a crucial skill

School librarians are digital literacy experts. Supporting staff and students with their information skills is part of their job description. School libraries can build students’ digital and information health-literacy skills, helping them evaluate online health information sources.

4. They support reading for pleasure

Reading for pleasure is associated with mental well-being.

School libraries facilitate reading for pleasure by providing comfortable reading spaces, as well as access to interesting texts. Visits to the library encourage young people to read more and positive attitudes toward reading.

Teacher librarians may also make recommendations and read books aloud, which is relaxing for young people.

Girl reading in a library, leaning against book shelf.
Reading for pleasure is associated with well-being.
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While much is known about the literacy benefits of reading, keen reading in childhood is also linked to healthy choices and fewer issues with behaviour in the teen years. Reading for pleasure can provide a valuable escape from the challenges of everyday life.



Read more:
Love, laughter, adventure and fantasy: a reading list for teens

However, the crowded curriculum can lead to reading for pleasure being undervalued in schools. Students at schools with libraries do not always have regular access to them, which is something schools need to ensure is provided.

5. They encourage healing through reading

Teacher librarians may also support students to engage with literature in healing ways. Known as bibliotherapy, which is “healing through books”, students can deal with issues challenging their well-being from a safe distance when they are experienced by book characters. They can also get guidance on how to cope from the experiences and perspectives of book characters.

Teacher librarians may select specific literature to support students encountering particular challenges. This is one of the numerous benefits of the literature expertise of teacher librarians.

School libraries and staffing are under threat and undervalued. These resources are easy to take for granted, and school libraries often lose out in budget cuts.

Where school libraries do not have the staff and materials they need, this can limit their ability to support student well-being. We need to better understand how our school libraries and staff contribute to student well-being so we can make the most of this valuable resource.The Conversation

Margaret Kristin Merga, Senior Lecturer in Education, Edith Cowan University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Reading progress is falling between year 5 and 7, especially for advantaged students: 5 charts

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Are we failing to challenge the reading
skills in advantaged students?
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Peter Goss, Grattan Institute

There is a hidden problem with reading in Australian schools. Ten years’ worth of NAPLAN data show improvements in years 3, 5 and 9. But reading progress has slowed dramatically between years 5 and 7.

And, somewhat surprisingly, the downward trend is strongest for the most advantaged students.

Years 5-7 typically include the transition from primary to secondary school. Yet the reading slowdown can’t just be blamed on this transition, because numeracy progress between the years has improved. So, what is going wrong with reading?

Reading base camp is higher each year

Progress in reading is like climbing a mountain. The better your reading skills, the higher you are. The higher you are, the further you can see. And the further you can see, the more sense you can make of the world.

Like a real mountain, the reading mountain must be tackled in stages. NAPLAN – the National Assessment Program, Literacy and Numeracy – provides insight into those stages, by measuring reading skills at years 3, 5, 7 and 9.

The good news is that the average level of reading skills of year 3 students – reading base camp – is getting higher.

To make the results easier to interpret, I’ve converted the NAPLAN data into the equivalent year level of reading achievement. For instance, in 2010, children in year 3 were reading at equivalent year level 2.6 when they sat NAPLAN. This means they were four-and-a-half months behind a benchmark set at the long-run average for metropolitan non-Indigenous students.

By 2019, the mean reading achievement among all year 3 children was equivalent to year 3.0, meeting this benchmark.

Over ten years, the improvement has been worth about five months of extra learning.

Reading progress improved in years 7-9

There is more good news in secondary school. Recent cohorts have made better progress between years 7 and 9 than earlier cohorts. My best estimate is that learning progress has increased by almost three months of learning over this two-year stage of schooling.

Students in years 3-5 haven’t made the same gains. But (if anything) they are heading in the right direction.

But progress in years 5-7 has fallen

Something is going wrong between year 5 and 7. Students are making six months less progress than they used to. It’s not that they are getting worse at reading; they just aren’t climbing as fast as previous cohorts.

This drop in reading progress can’t simply be attributed to the transition from primary to secondary. Among other things, numeracy progress during this stage of schooling has increased by about six months since 2010.

It’s as if students have started skipping a term in each of their final two years of primary school, but only in English, not in maths. And not all groups of students are affected equally.

Advantaged students are affected the most

Reading progress has slowed the most for students from advantaged backgrounds. For instance, students whose parents are senior managers make ten months less progress from year 5 to 7 than earlier cohorts.

Interestingly, the student groups with the biggest slowdown in years 5-7 have also shown the most improvement in year 5 reading.

This pattern – big gains in year 5 that evaporate by year 7 – rules out poor early reading instruction as a cause. This reading problem isn’t about phonics, but a failure to stretch students in upper primary school.

My analysis also shows:

  • the years 5-7 reading slump is happening in every state and territory
  • Queensland and Western Australia had big drops in years 5-7 reading progress in 2015, the year those two states moved year 7 from primary to secondary
  • students from English-speaking backgrounds are affected more than those who don’t speak English at home
  • neither gender nor Indigenous status affects the strength of the slowdown.

So, what is going on?

Maybe some primary school teachers focus more on helping students reach a good minimum standard of reading, and not on how far they go. This fits with the trend in year 5; no need to push hard if students are already doing well.

But it doesn’t explain the large drop in progress in Queensland and WA the year they shifted year 7 to secondary school.

Maybe schools push hard on literacy and numeracy until students have done their last NAPLAN test in that school. This would help explain the 2015 drop in reading progress for Queensland and WA, but not the divergent picture for reading and numeracy progress, including in the Queensland/WA change-over year.

Maybe students are reading less as technology becomes ubiquitous. This could explain the difference between reading and numeracy. But why would it reduce progress between years 5 and 7 but not between years 3 and 5 or 7 and 9?

Increased use of technology also fails to explain the sudden slump in Queensland and WA in 2015.

Other potential explanations need to explain the complex pattern of outcomes, including the fact the reading slowdown is so widespread even while numeracy progress is going the other way.

My best guess is that some advantaged primary schools focus on literacy and numeracy until the year 5 NAPLAN tests are done, but then switch to project-based learning, leadership or year 6 graduation projects. These “gap year” activities don’t displace maths hour (which drives numeracy progress) but may disrupt reading hour or other activities that build reading skills.

Meanwhile, disadvantaged primary schools are very aware of the need to keep building their students’ reading levels to set them up for success in secondary school.

This story is speculative, but it fits the data.

What next?

Education system leaders need to figure out what is happening in reading between years 5 and 7, and quickly. They should look closely at upper primary years, as well as the transition to secondary school. This is much more subtle than a traditional back-to-basics narrative.

In the meantime, teachers in years 5, 6 and 7 should be aware their students are making less progress than previous cohorts, and focus on extending reading capabilities for students who are already doing well. All students deserve to climb higher on their reading mountain.The Conversation

Peter Goss, School Education Program Director, Grattan Institute

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Students say textbooks are too expensive – could an open access model be the answer?

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Roxanne Missingham, Australian National University

For university students, textbooks have been both a saviour and a bane. Having most of the essential readings in a single volume enables students to access resources easily. Despite mostly being used for short periods of time, they come with a hefty price tag – and weight.

With the price of textbooks increasing – in the decade to 2013, the price of textbooks worldwide increased by 82%, roughly triple the price on inflation – they are becoming less accessible to students.

In Australia textbooks cost hundreds of dollars each. For administrative law, a student might spend A$123.95 on a single textbook. A big investment for one course.

The National Union of Students in Australia has launched a campaign to make textbooks cheaper – calling for the removal of import restrictions on books. According to the union, some students are dropping subjects or changing their degrees because textbooks are so expensive.

To add to this, last year the Australian government ceased student scholarships to fund textbooks and other education resources, and instead replaced this funding with a student start-up loan, as a way to make government savings.

Creating an open access textbook

But adopting an open access model in the US is radically shaking up this highly profitable textbook industry.

The textbook industry is worth US$14 billion at year in the US and over A$2 billion in Australia.

The movement is to create open access textbooks, which would mean any student or member of the public, could access the appropriate texts online for free.

Campaigns for affordable textbooks have blossomed starting with strong advocacy in the US, and in October last year, the US Congress announced they would introduce a competitive grant program – called the Affordable College Textbook Act – to support the creation and use of open university textbooks.

This means high quality textbooks will be easily accessible globally to students, professors and the public for free.

How would open access textbooks change education?

So far the open access movement has focused on making publicly-funded research available to the world. In Australia, more than 400,000 open access research papers are available online through Australian universities with around 32 million downloads this year.

Studies in the US have shown that open access textbooks are associated with better student retention, higher marks and greater literacy.

A study by students at Virginia State University School of Business found that students using these textbooks “tended to have higher grades and lower failing and withdrawal rates than those in courses that did not use” the texts.

Results from a study of 5,000 post-secondary students in ten institutions in the US using open educational resources (OER) and over 11,000 control students using commercial textbooks, found that “students whose faculty chose OER generally performed as well or better than students whose faculty assigned commercial textbooks.

There are some different models for the creation of open access textbooks.

The Gold open access model allows payments to be made to traditional publishers to make texts open access. While this developed in the journal market it is increasingly available for books.

There are now hundreds of open access textbooks – most of those listed in the Open Textbook Library have been published by universities.

It challenges the publishers who have relied on textbooks for their profits – however it is still early days.

But as a case in the US shows, changing the university mindset is not easy. Last year, an associate professor of mathematics at California State University was reprimanded for assigning his students with a less expensive textbook option – as well as open access material – than his department’s US$180 preference.

In Australia, the Australian National University has begun a bold experiment with open access e-textbooks. Three text books have been published so far, with more planned.

The experiences of the first three textbooks (in law, botany and languages) indicate that students are able to use these materials differently with better educational outcomes. This gives students a greater set of capabilities to start their careers with as they are more likely to complete their degrees and achieve better results.

Open access textbooks are able to change quickly to ensure the most up-to-date material is online. Hands on resources that are built on in class experiments that have been researched to produce the best learning are able to be implemented.

Open access textbooks have the potential to have an enormous impact on student learning. It is time for Australia to learn from the initiatives in US and take a major step forward.

The Conversation

Roxanne Missingham, University Librarian, Australian National University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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How reading fiction can help students understand the real world

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Melissa Tandiwe Myambo, University of California, Los Angeles

The real world is often overwhelmingly complicated. Literature can help. This is true at universities too: courses in comparative literature offer students new insights into their chosen disciplines by unlocking new, varied perspectives.

How can those studying political science truly grasp the terror of living under a dictator? Perhaps by reading Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat, a magnificent historical novel about the tyrannical Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic. Students who read it are unlikely to forget the dizzying Cold War political intrigues that led the US to first support Trujillo and then implement sanctions against him.

In area studies, students must learn about the politics of postcolonial government. Chinua Achebe’s 1966 novel, A Man of the People, explores how rapidly post-independence revolutionary zeal can turn venal as the corrupt, greedy postcolonial elite seizes the reins of power from the coloniser only to further strangle the majority.

I would suggest that teaching these and other subjects – history, economics, sociology, geography and many others – can only be enhanced by including novels, short stories and artistic feature films. Students will also benefit from learning the methods of critical reading that are inherent to literary study. In this article I will explore why this is the case, focusing largely on the important but contested field of international development studies.

Why development is about more than economics

International development studies cries out for a literary component precisely because it is such an ideological and normative subject. “Development” is itself a term that should demand ideological evaluation. It is more than economics. This is made clear by the UN’s Millennium and Sustainable Development Goals. These reiterate that “development” also focuses on cultural change, such as gender equity through empowering women and girls.

But the syllabus of almost any international development studies course contains a heavy dose of development economists: Amartya Sen, Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs. Or, if the professor is slightly more left-leaning, there will be works by anthropologists like James Ferguson and Arturo Escobar or brilliant political science professor Timothy Mitchell. Why only these? This is an area in which books in the humanities and arts are pertinent, yet one never sees a postcolonial novel on these syllabi.

It is frankly criminal. Development was constituted as a field of study and area of practice during the years of decolonisation after World War II. This was the very same time period which spawned the birth of what is today called postcolonial literature. But international development studies courses seldom broach the fundamental question of what is truly meant by development. Developing to what? For whose benefit? Under whose aegis? This question, however, is interrogated in a vast body of excellent fiction.

I have prescribed Nuruddin Farah’s 1993 novel, Gifts – inspired by Marcel Mauss’ classic ethnography The Gift – to my students. When development aid from powerful countries is donated to impoverished 1980s Somalia, a fine line is walked by both the West which “gives” and the Somalis who “receive.” The book is a long meditation on the tightrope act that teeters between donation and domination. Certainly my students learned more about how it really feels to be the recipient of donor aid from this novel than any of our social science readings, which were mostly written from the donors’ point of view.

Exploring different points of view

This isn’t to suggest that such novels are stand-ins for “native informants”, who are perceived to be experts about a culture, race or place simply because they belong to it. Quite the contrary. They should be read as literature, which literary critics like Mikhail Bakhtin describe as a jumble of competing viewpoints depending on language that always struggles to convey actual truth.

Point of view might be an easier concept for students to grasp at first than Bakhtin’s theory. It is a basic narrative technique that is explored in Literary Criticism 101 because it can change the way a story is told or perceived. In the rich 2006 film Bamako the people of Mali put the World Bank on trial to determine why their poisoned “gift” of development aid has left the country with such a debilitating debt burden.

From the World Bank’s perspective, development might mean one thing but for those “beneficiaries,” it means something quite different. Art has the power to convey that point of view with visceral impact. Isn’t this essential for international development students who aim to help the “other” to “develop”?

Room for myriad insights

The end state of “development,” which is implied but hardly ever explicitly theorised in international development studies, is “modernity” and becoming “modern”. This is a subject on which literature and literary theory can offer myriad insights.

Zakes Mda’s wonderful 2005 novel Heart of Redness depicts the tale of a contemporary village in post-apartheid South Africa. Here, two groups of villagers hold radically different positions on what development means to them. Does it mean street lamps and a casino resort that will bring tourists? Or maintaining a more “traditional,” environmentally-sustainable lifestyle albeit with some “modern” amenities? The villagers’ differing positions are also informed by their different views on their history of colonisation.

History is, of course, essential for understanding any subject. For this reason I’ve not restricted myself to postcolonial literature only in teaching my classes. Robinson Crusoe, first published in 1719, is an excellent novel for introducing the study of British imperialism which is a prerequisite for understanding our contemporary global cultural economy.

Pushing for positive change

In our globalising world, the stakes could not be higher. Many of our students will end up making policy, allocating aid, driving the global economy. They will change the world. Literature and humanistic thinking enable them to change it for the better.

The Conversation

Melissa Tandiwe Myambo, Fublright-Nehru Scholar, Research Associate, Centre for Indian Studies, Wits University, University of California, Los Angeles

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Schools need advice on how to help students with reading difficulties

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John Munro, University of Melbourne

As students prepare to go back to school, it’s estimated that between 10% to 16% of those aged from five to 16 years will have reading difficulties such as dyslexia and inadequate comprehension skills.

All teaching makes particular assumptions about how students tend to learn. For these students, regular literacy teaching will be insufficient. They need alternative teaching pathways.

Despite numerous policies, such as the Literacy and Numeracy National Partnership, and the A$706.3 million spent between 2008-2014 on reading programs to support students, literacy underachievement continues to plague Australian education, suggesting that current interventions are not working for all students. Teachers don’t necessarily know how to teach these children.

The problem is not a lack of research about what works. It is more the lack of guidance for teachers and schools in how to use this knowledge in teaching.

School leaders are responsible for making definitive decisions about educational provision in their schools. They need clear and explicit guidelines on how to choose effective literacy interventions that will work for these students.

Why do some students struggle with reading?

Reading comprehension is a complex process. Students have difficulty comprehending text for several reasons:

  • Some don’t know the sounds that make up spoken words (phonological and phonemic skills) or have difficulty saying letter patterns accurately (phonic skills). These lead to word reading and spelling difficulties, or dyslexia.

  • Some lack the vocabulary and other oral language knowledge that scaffolds reading comprehension.

  • Others have a relatively poor self-concept as a reader. They believe they can’t learn to read and disengage from literacy.

  • Some students don’t transfer what they learn about reading some texts to other texts.

Any interventions, then, need to cater for this range of differences.

What’s needed

Research suggests that reading comprehension could be improved by teaching:

  • explicitly phonological and phonemic skills
  • phonic skills
  • how to improve reading fluency
  • ways to enhance vocabulary
  • paraphrasing
  • how to visualise and summarise what a text says while reading, and generate questions
  • how to use various idea-organising techniques such as concept mapping to link the ideas in the text.

Teaching the sound patterns and how to say written works is particularly useful for dyslexic difficulties.

Interventions that work

The Early Reading Intervention Knowledge (ERIK) program is an example of how research can be used to develop school-based interventions.

Developed from a large research analysis of the causes of early reading difficulties in the early 2000s, it has been used in grade 1-5 in Catholic primary schools in Victoria.

Students are allocated to one of three parallel intervention pathways depending on their reading difficulty profile; a phonological pathway, an orthographic pathway for students who have phonological skills and difficulty reading letter clusters, and an oral language pathway. Students can move between pathways.

A recent evaluation, available for Catholic Education Melbourne, showed that the three intervention pathways are very effective in improving the reading outcomes of students who underachieve or are at risk of future reading and writing difficulties.

Effect sizes were calculated for eight reading profiles, based on whether the students began with difficulties in one or more of reading comprehension, accuracy or rate. Students with difficulties in two or more areas improved in excess of two years in comprehension and in accuracy. The intervention usually lasted between one and two terms.

Younger students benefited more from the phonological and orthographic interventions while their older peers benefited more from the oral language intervention.

Findings such as these have implications for schools.

How to select the right program for your school

When a school leader is selecting a program to help improve students’ literacy outcomes they first need to ask:

  • Does it match the range of ways in which my students underachieve? Students need a program that accommodates their reason for underachievement.
  • Does it have multiple parallel literacy learning pathways, and doesn’t assume that one size fits all?
  • Does it have explicit teaching procedures for each pathway? How comprehensive and systematic are they?
  • Does it provide a means for identifying each student’s literacy learning profile and for deciding the pathway for optimal progress for that student? Or does it assume that all students will best progress by following the same pathway?
  • What research supports the effectiveness of the intervention? Does it provide data that show that students of different reading profiles make progress using it?
  • Is it based explicitly on an accepted research theory of how students learn to read? Many programs are not based on a rigorously and extensively researched theory.

These are key issues that any school leader who is thoughtfully and responsibly selecting a literacy intervention program in 2016 needs to answer.

Many know their current interventions do not work for all underachieving students. Decisions they make will live with their most academically vulnerable students for years to come. Education providers need to develop clear guidelines to ensure teachers are making appropriate decisions.

The Conversation

John Munro, Associate Professor, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Google Play Books Updated To Make It A Better eReader For Students, Chefs, And Others Who Read Huge Books

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UN partners with Worldreader to give Kindles to students in refugee camps

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Laura Hazard Owen's avatarGigaom

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is partnering with nonprofit Worldreader on a pilot project to provide Kindles (s AMZN) loaded with ebooks to 2,300 students in refugee camps in Tanzania.

Worldreader was cofounded by former Microsoft (s MSFT) and Amazon executive David Risher and economist Colin McElwee in 2010 and is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Europe and Africa. It has launched pilot programs providing Kindles to schools in nine sub-Saharan African countries over the past two years, but McElwee said that this is arguably its most important partnership because the UN is “an enormous potential scaling partner” aiding “the most vulnerable people on the planet.” If the pilot works, the program could expand to other refugee camps overseen by the UN.

A student at the Ntimigom School in Kilgoris, Kenya. http://www.flickr.com/photos/48114529@N06/6776770558/in/set-72157629062449936/ A student at the Ntimigom School in Kilgoris, Kenya. http://www.flickr.com/photos/48114529@N06/6776770558/in/set-72157629062449936/

The Tanzanian camps house about 105,000 refugees affected by the conflicts in the Democratic…

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Article: Teacher Helps Students Build Home Libraries

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The link below is to a good news story about a school teacher who is helping students develop their own libraries.

For more visit:
http://www.good.is/post/arkansas-teacher-helps-students-build-home-libraries/