Significance of School Libraries in Online Teaching-Learning Activities during the COVID-19 Pandemic in select National Schools of Batticaloa District, Sri Lanka

Abstract

There is a tendency in reported documents pertaining to school education in Sri Lanka to have literally omitted school libraries and information resources. Teachers and students struggled to gain access to appropriate information resources. After performing a pilot survey to validate the reliability of the questionnaire, a sample of 209 subjects was randomly selected from 459 teachers in select National Schools in Batticaloa Education Zone. A semi-structured questionnaire was administered across WhatsApp groups of those teachers and response rate was 77.5%. Data were analysed using One-Sample Wilcoxon Signed-Rank, Chi-Square, and thematic analysis since a mixed method was employed. In this survey, teachers have expressed that school libraries were essential in providing resources to support teaching-learning activities although they have not received sufficient support from school libraries. Study further found that the role of school librarians in educating teachers and students with respect to copyright was underrated. Therefore, as the study results revealed, there was a considerable gap between the need and the availability of resources, which needs to be bridged through school libraries.

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