Research

Read News Bites for some great ways to connect with your students—learn more about the immigrant experience with the Smithsonian’s education conferences and offer students Shmoop’s video analysis of dozens of literature favorites.

An important new study of Pennsylvania's schools shows that students in schools with full-time librarians score substantially higher on reading and writing tests than their counterparts in schools that lack librarians.

However compelling the research is, it can be hard to make the case with a 30-page study, or even a executive summary. Sometimes you need the visually attractive, embeddable, tweetable version of the elevator speech. Over the past couple of months we’ve seen a research translated and chunked in the form of infographics.  We’ve also [...]

The Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies has introduced a program to encourage research, discovery and creative collaboration with project-based learning. Smithsonian Quests awards online digital badges to students (and teachers!) upon completion of their activities. The projects are aimed at students of various grade levels, and can be done as part of classroom lessons or independently.

Cool Tools columnist Richard Byrne presents some free options for research that don’t require a login, along with a few quick tips to aid student searches.

I am adding Edcanvas to my toolkit for curating, flipping, and presenting. The flexible platform allows teachers and students to organize and share teaching and learning materials, or their research products, in the form of a attractive visual grids composed of tiles. Pick a topic, choose a theme (tile layout) and create a canvas by [...]

I was about to write an alert about several of the interesting new Pew Internet & American Life Project studies, when I discovered that it is now easier to discover those studies. The Pew Project recently added a Libraries page to their site, gathering research especially relevant to our community, as well as updates from [...]

Remember how last year’s spending survey was such a downer? Well, according to the results of our 2010–2011 survey, the picture remains bleak. School librarians, especially those out West, are still struggling to get by on bare-bones budgets. Media specialists are still battling to keep pace with a slew of additional duties—everything from serving as student advisors to maintaining their buildings’ online networks. And although most school libraries’ doors remain open 35 to 40 hours a week..