3. Education
Must Take
Rigor New
Directions
www.infohio.org
4. Are Students Prepared?
100
90
80
70 65% 62% Average percentage
60 60% of students in their
50 current classes
teachers believe
40 could leave HS
30 PK – 5 6–8 9 – 12 prepared to succeed
20 in a 2- or 4-year
college
10
0
Strongly agree
Slide courtesy of the Ohio Department of Education
www.infohio.org
5. Question:
What percentage of students
did 88 percent of college and
university librarians report are
prepared to do college-level
research?
-According to a national study in a 2010
issue of Learning & Media
www.infohio.org
8. Common Core’s 3 Big Ideas
1. Literacy is everyone’s job.
2. Students must read complex texts
independently and proficiently in
every discipline.
3. Students must write argumentative
and explanatory texts in every
discipline (process writing and on-
demand writing).
Barnhart, Marcia, INFOhio Common Core ELA and Literacy Standards webinar, 2-12-12. www.infohio.org
9. Shift to Nonfiction Texts
Informational text
makes up the vast
majority of the
required reading in
college/workplace
Slide courtesy of the Ohio Department of Education www.infohio.org
15. Research Databases
Art Collection Literature Online
Biography Reference Bank Mango Languages
Digital Video Collection News Bank
EBSCOhost Oxford Reference
Enc. Estudiantil Hallazgos Proquest Ancestry.com
Gran Enciclopedia Hispanica Science Online
L'Encyclopedie Decouverte WB Early World of Learning
Learning Express Library WorldBook Web
www.infohio.org
Hello, I’m Terri Fredericka, Executive Director of INFOhio, and I’m pleased to be here today to talk to you about changes in education that are affecting the teens—really all the students—who come in your library. And then I want to share with you a few ideas we at INFOhio are using to help connect teens with the information they need—to help them have the power they need to succeed wherever life leads them.INFOhio is Ohio’s digital library for pre-K through 12. For 20 years we have helped districts save money and offer students the best research sources by automating school libraries and developing relationships with the State Library of Ohio, public and university libraries that let us license research databases as a group, saving districts millions of dollars annually. We are not technically a government agency, but we are a nonprofit, and through grants and state and federal funding we offer many of our products and services free of charge to Ohio districts.
First, I want to share with you 2 main trends that are affecting teens.The first, is of course, increasing digitization. You know that more of our lives are lived online. But did you know that more and more of teens’ schoolwork has to be completed online? Not only are they required to do more online, but there is an increasing shift for them to mobile devices. Many students have a smart phone even if they don’t have a computer at home.
The second major trend that will be affecting teens is the shift in education that’s coming with the Common Core State Standards.It has become increasingly and sadly clear how unprepared our students are coming out of school. Not only do that not perform well when compared to students from other developed countries, but they also are unprepared to perform well in our own post secondary schools and in careers.
Results from: PRIMARY SOURCES: 2012AMERICA’S TEACHERS ON THE TEACHING PROFESSION A Project of Scholastic and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Average percent of students in theircurrent classes who they believe could leave HS prepared to succeed in a 2- or 4-year college.So that means that high school teachers think 40 percent of their students are not ready.
This is a question from a 2010 survey of college and university librarians.It’s almost the same questions as the one we just examined posed to high school teachers.So, how many students do college librarians think are able to do college-level research?
They think just 40% are ready. Which means that 60% are struggling.Notice that this is identical to the percentage of students high-school teachers estimate to be ready for college and careers that we just saw.I think we’ve identified a trend.
The answer is the Common Core State Standards.The Common Core is a nationwide initiative. Governors and State Superintendents concerned that U.S. students are falling behind their peers internationally spearheaded the effort to shift way children are taught. The Common Core is a grassroots efforts from the states, not a federal mandate in the way that No Child Left Behind was. States voluntarily adopt the Common Core Standards, and this map shows you the states that have so far. If your state has adopted the Common Core, then the demands on your students is going to shift dramatically in the next 2-3 years.
These are the 3 big ideas of the Common Core that libraries can help address. You’ll hear the term “literacy across the curriculum,” which means that reading and writing will be incorporated in English, Math, Science, Social Studies and Technical Subjects (what are Technical subjects?—every other curriculum area).“Text complexity” is another term you’ll hear. That is, students must be able to read increasingly difficult texts in all subject areas.The trend is away from writing merely as self expression and to a means for analysis.
One way that those three ideas will manifest themselves in daily instruction is in the shift to nonfiction texts.Informational text makes up vast majority of the required reading in college/workplace (80%). This is the change that I think affects public libraries the most. You might want to start adding high-interest nonfiction to your collection, not just reference texts, but popular nonfiction at all grade levels.In elementary school, students will read a blend of 50% nonfiction and 50% fiction. But by high school, those percentages will change to 70% nonfiction /30 % fiction. This is a shift in thinking for teachers and librarians.
Another very basic change of the Common Core is a shift in the number of topics covered. No longer will students be taught broad surveys of information. Instead, they will be studying fewer subjects in more depth. They will be thinking deeper about each subject.
Now, I want to share with you a few of the programs INFOhio has developed in the last few years to support students. These are Ohio specific and incorporate the research databases that we have licensed, but I’m hoping you can find something you can adapt for your own patrons, or use as a springboard to develop something even better.
INFOhio has the resources to accommodate these major educational shifts. INFOhio provides educators, students and families with a “virtual door” to no cost, high quality, teacher selected, and curriculum-related databases for your instructional program. Many of you have probably used Google or Wikipedia at one time or another. These are good resources, but to raise the bar and reach for the rigor required in the Common Core you need access to multiple digital and print databases that provide reliable and authoritative evidence.INFOhio electronic resources – provided at no charge -- are funded by Libraries Connect Ohio (LCO) using a combination of federal funds through the State Library of Ohio, in addition to state appropriations from OhioLINK (a university consortium), OPLIN (a public library technical support organization), and INFOhio. The data that you see on the screen reflects the $24.15 per student it would cost each district if they had to purchase the same 16 databases with their own funding.
Even an ILS system has tools to help. For example, the ILS we support has an option for searching by Lexile. While not the only measure of text complexity, Lexile gives teachers and students a solid starting point.
Even something supposedly simple such as reviewing a book is a form of analytical writing and helps students reflect on what they’ve read and learned. You see here the Chili Fresh add on to the ILS, which allows students to rate a book and write a review.
Students can explore the databases on their own. For example, LearningExpress Library is a great one for them to explore because it contains tools for College success and lifelong learning.It offers eBooks on a variety of business topics, Business software courses, skill building for adults in math, science, and English, and workshops in resume writing and interviewing skills.
GO! Ask, Act, Achieve is an example of our work to put the resources in context for students.This site is designed for 6th-10th graders—students just learning to conduct long-term research projects.But we’ve had college professors say they’d like to use it with their students. And the site would work for 4th and 5th graders who read well. The idea behind this site is to keep students from being overwhelmed by a big research project by breaking it down into small, manageable chunks.
Ask helps students get started with their research by asking the right questions and determining what they already know about the topic.
Act helps students find and organize information, either alone or in a group.
Achieve helps students create and present the results of their research.
Each question within each major section breaks down the process even further. This is where students can find specific resources to help them with that specific question.For example, this is the How Do I Evaluate My Project page under Achieve. You see several different resources linked there to help them think through that step.And, incidentally, self-evaluation is a step that is often neglected but a step that helps students improve faster and learn how to manage their work on their own after school.
There are several types of resources included throughout.Of course, we use INFOhio resources, such as Science Online.
We also use interactive PDFs. This means that a student may download the PDF and type right on the PDF then print it. A teacher could also print enough for her class and have them complete it by hand.We like these as a way for students to organize their thinking.
Videos are another resource type that we have incorporated throughout. This one from the Cooperative Library Instruction project shares, in less than 4 minutes, smart ways to use Wikipedia to start academic research. It’s great, by the way, if you haven’t seen it.
Each section is introduced by a Voki (avatar). The characters sympathize with the students and encourage them to keep trying.Josh introduces the Ask section.
Hannah introduces the Act section and Luke, the Achieve section. We worked with a high school drama class to provide the voices.
Here is another example of putting resources in context. This is a new online, blended-learning course we’ve developed, Research 4 Success. It will be piloted in two weeks.These modules help students with college and career readiness includes research skills - the course is provided for teachers to work with students; however, is open for students to use on their own too...so they can come back to the content and tools in the future. A huge underpinning of all the modules is using and sharing information ethically. It teaches them how to cite information and understand the implications of copyright.
We've worked with Kent State University to validate the TRAILS (Tool for Read-time assessment of information literacy skills) assessments for grade 3,6,9,12.We’ve integrated that with R4S as the pre and post assessments.As an aside, TRAILS is available for people across the country to use. If you’re interested, go to http://www.trails-9.org/.
Where do we go from here? What can we do to keep moving forward?
We continue to lookfor ways to connect.Connect students to our resources.And connect with each other. We’re finding that if school, public, and university libraries work together, we meet our students’ needs faster.
