Haves, Halves, and Have-Nots: School Libraries and Student Achievement in California Page: 44
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library media specialists at its schools. The author found that 66 % of students who had benefited
from a library media specialist in high school earned an A in the course, while between 37 and
43 % of students from the two districts without library media specialists earned A's. Smalley
concludes that students coming from high schools with library media specialists are "more
familiar with basic library use concepts, fundamental ideas about how information is organized
and made accessible, and how to use online catalogs to advantage...than are students from high
schools without librarians" (p. 196).
Staffing and Reading Achievement
Many of the findings about school library staffing are related to students' reading. While
some of these are partly a function of students' access to reading materials, others involve the
connections between staffing and effective promotion of reading activities, students' attitudes
toward reading, and reading achievement. Masterton's 1953 study (as cited in Gaver, 1963) of a
Chicago elementary school found that students' improvement in reading scores is more
pronounced when a full-time librarian supervises an active library program. In 1956, Monahan
(as cited in Ireland, 2001) found in a comparison of two Indian elementary schools that in the
elementary school with the professionally staffed central library, students read more books and
of a greater variety than at the school without a professionally staffed library. The Harvard
Report on Reading in Elementary Schools (Austin & Morrison, 1963) found that one of the
greatest obstacles to effective school library programs in the promotion of reading was the
pervasive lack of available trained librarians. In her landmark study, Effectiveness of Centralized
Library Services in Elementary Schools, Gaver (1963) examined three levels of school library
service: classroom collections without a librarian, centralized collections administered by a
teacher who has teaching duties beyond the library or by a parent volunteer, and school libraries44
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Achterman, Douglas L. Haves, Halves, and Have-Nots: School Libraries and Student Achievement in California, dissertation, December 2008; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc9800/m1/58/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .