In Search of Theory: A Deep Dive Into the Characteristics of School Librarian Outliers

Abstract

The need for rigorous empirical investigation into the effect of school librarians on student achievement is undeniable.Although hundreds of correlational and descriptive research studies proclaim school librarians' positive effect on student achievement, there is no theoretical framework that explains what it is that school librarians do regarding teaching or the provision of resources that actually influences student success.The purpose of this study is to identify schools in which school librarians are beating the odds-schools that are performing better than expected in comparison to schools that are underperforming in terms of performance on standardized achievement tests.A comparison of variables that distinguishes the two groups will help to begin to form a theory explaining the influence of school librarians on student learning.An outlier analysis technique reveals differences in the following school library characteristics: demographics, scheduling, and collaborative behaviors. PurposeAlthough the effect of school librarians on student achievement has been investigated for nearly three decades beginning with Keith Curry Lance's Colorado School Library State Report (1990), two critical components remain missing:1. Strong, empirical evidence of how and what school librarians contribute to student success.2. An underlying theory of action or model, providing clear linkages between what school librarians do, or the instructional resources/services that school librarians provide, and their effect on student outcomes (American Association of School Librarians, 2014;Grover & Fowler, 1993;Morris & Cahill, 2017;Stefl-Mabry & Radlick, 2016, 2017;Stefl-Mabry & Radlick, 2018).Conventional wisdom amongst many school library researchers and practitioners has been that "the mere presence of a school librarian is associated with better student outcomes" (Johnston & Green, 2018; Lance & Kachel, 2018, p. 17; Lance, Rodney, & Hamilton-Pennell, 2001).A systematic analysis of over 300 peer reviewed publications including 30 widely cited school library impact state reports exploring the relationship of school librarians and student achievement spanning nearly 30 years empirically identified seven weaknesses:

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 1 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.